


there are two of us in here

by Ler



Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: F/M, Not as angsty as you might think, Triggers, disabled AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-25 09:41:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7527769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ler/pseuds/Ler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps of all things she regrets the worst is that the last thing she sees in her life is Roland’s face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Marianne

**Author's Note:**

> I owe this work to the Strange Magic fandom, the profound sensibility and love it has towards its source material, and the raw talent that overflows them both. 
> 
> But be warned, this work touches upon some serious themes, like trauma, post-traumatic adaptation, implied suicide attempt, depression, emotional abuse, and a choice few other. If you find any of these themes triggering, beware. Take care, of yourself and others around you.
> 
> After all, this is a story about love, that doesn't have to be in the eyes of the beholder to be one.

 

 

 

Perhaps of all things she regrets the worst is that the last thing she sees in her life is Roland’s face.

 

 

 

Everything floats. Things appear around her out of nowhere and come crashing down with sounds that are too loud, too much, she has a splitting migraine from the sheer amount of  **sound**.

When she wakes up, the first time, she tries to wake up again. She attempts to furiously blink the world into existence, and it stubbornly refuses to do so, darkness surrounding her in blobs of barely recognizable color.

Sitting up with a jerk, nose assaulted by sterile air and chemicals, heart beating with the erratic bleeps, her hands search around her, and find cotton and wool prickling her fingertips, and a lifeline sticking out of her arm. But her hands are darkness and so is everything else, and she feels the jitter rising from her bones, growing into trembling, growing into shaking, as everything hurts, so bad, and her breathing turns against her.

She hears shuffling, the sound of something opening and suddenly slamming shut, as the patter turns to sharp footsteps, and something touching her shoulder.

“Marianne!”

Her sister. She turns towards the noise, but again, there is nothing but black there.

“Dawn,” she says, but recognizes her voice only by the croaking tremor it causes passing her throat.

“You’re finally awake,” the girl exhales, and suddenly, there is a pressure against her chest and around her ribcage, hands laid on her back. The words crawl against her ear. “We were so worried, there was an accident-”

“Dawn,” the image of Roland’s face, unusually unattractive, disfigured with anger and frustration and lies, and a flash of terror, as he screams when the blaring lights illuminate his features, swipes into her mind.

She remembers floating, and a feeling of a thousand needles piercing her skin, cheeks, neck, shoulders, chest, as she tries to cover herself, phantom pain setting her on fire. But Marianne endures with clenched teeth, nameless prayers caged in her chest.

Her sister pulls back, small touches against her forehead, clearing her face.

“But it’s okay now, you’re okay.”

Marianne realizes that she is crying only when something wet trickles down the slope of her face and falls, splatting, on her lap.

She stares into the darkness, and at the barely remarkable flash of light by her side, and finally realizes what it is. An ugly word itches at her teeth, and she swallows it back, before her trembling lips have a chance to utter it, to make it real.

Instead she murmurs, and everything grows still.

“I can’t see.”

 

 

 _Retinal detachment_ , says the man, who was supposed to help her, trying to shine light into her darkness, but she only knows so by a faint clicking sound, and the white transparent gleams drifting across her vision. _Inoperable_.

 

 

Marianne doesn’t even want to waste her energy on feeling disappointed. She doesn’t want to waste the bare minimum of what she has on a useless emotion that only confirms what she already somehow knew. That would mean she would have to sacrifice something else to do so. Like showering. Or brushing her teeth. Or walking. She can’t really afford that. Dawn doesn’t deserve that.

When it’s time to leave the hospital, Dawn tries to help her to get dressed. She still doesn’t talk much, but moves with defined noises, and Marianne finds it more irritating than anything else. She can get dressed on her own. She can walk, she doesn’t need the stupid chair, she can-

She can’t.

Her feet catch the leg of the bed and she comes down crashing on the floor, her bruised and battered arms crisscrossed with healing scars (she knows, she traced them with her fingers) dampening her fall but barely. Of course, they are rushing to her side, her father leaning to her with his cracking knees, arm over her shoulder - she can’t dare to even imagine him now, with his trembling fingertips, and meek words that are supposed to make her feel better - _we’ll find the best doctor, I’ll pay any amount_ \- but makes her only wonder if he blames himself for what one freak accident turned her into.

She pushes him away and gets up on her feet. They are not stable, but they are the best she has.

Marianne walks out of the hospital into a black world, where the dark sun shines, its light reflecting of the ink snow, and the faceless people live full lives that she too might have.

Someday.

Probably.

 

 

She prefers not to think about Roland. She asks about him only once, while the medication they give her starts to make her sick.

“Is he alive?” she says with dry lips and scratching throat that she blames on dehydration.

Her sister doesn’t know what to say, so she says the truth. “Yes. Barely a scratch on him.”

So Marianne says the truth as well.

“I wish he would have died.”

 

 

Languages were never Marianne’s strong suit, and now she has to learn a whole new one.

Braille makes its way into her life in one big crushing wave. Suddenly everything is braille, her washer, her oven, even some of her books, after she empties one of her shelves in a single furious bout of frustration, scream ripping from her throat.

 

[The reproductions of long-dead Italians do nothing for her if she can’t see them. She misses them, sometimes, voluminous faces engulfed in chiaroscuro, their cheeks and hips blooming with blush and twisted with agonies, or pleasure, or sometimes both, embracing life, embracing death, with gusto that only works when you know life’s too short to waste. Perhaps they knew something that she didn’t. Who was she really to criticize them? Who is she now to judge?]

 

She thinks it’s her father’s doing. He still doesn’t talk to her. And she is grateful. She doesn’t know what would happen if he starts talking, with his soft warm hands grasping hers. Dawn is bad enough as it is. She communicates in calm whispers, and places Marianne’s arms on the crooks of her elbows, walking her, bedroom to bathroom, bathroom to kitchen, kitchen to the large chair in the living room, her favorite.

Dawn reads to her, books, magazines, but she can’t do so for long, her voice gets tired - or so she says - but puts on the TV instead. Marianne can’t watch it, but she sure can listen. And that’s good enough, she tells herself.

The television becomes her companion. News channels are the best. They tell her all about the world, share with her, most intimately, the horrors and the joys, and sometimes, when Dawn has to do grocery shopping, Marianne talks to them, about politics and weather, and trusts them.

They do not fuss. They do not pity. They do not sit in the kitchen in the middle of the night when she pretends to dream, hushed conversations growing somber each day, just to rustle her from sleep on the next with tired forced joy.  They do not make Marianne want to crawl beneath the covers and claw at her own clothes, neckline of her t-shirt stuffed into her mouth so that she, herself, would not be heard.

 

[In her dreams, Marianne still floats. She remembers breaking glass, and the pain comes back, her whole body itching where the bits of it stab into her skin, burying themselves deeper, and she digs at them, trying to pull them out. Those dreams always end with her back hitting something, a sudden drop knocking air out of her lungs, sparks exploding through her eyes straight from the place where her head impacts, and she wakes up gasping, trying to catch them, put them back where they belong, tiniest glowing shards of a smashed window mosaic, but they sift through her hand. And the void stares back at her.]

 

 

She occasionally – now with diminishing rarity, but still - breaks a mug when she is not careful, and one time Dawn found her crying in the shower because she couldn’t find her towel that was always there, why wouldn’t it be now, when she needs it?

“I put it in the laundry,” mumbles her sister in return, turning off the water, pulling her out, wrapping her something thick and fluffy. “I wanted to hang a new one tomorrow morning. Sorry.”

 

 

Sometimes, and those times start to happen more often, she breaks the mugs on purpose. The sound of smashing ceramics, she finds, fills the silence with purpose, for they create more sounds, footsteps, a sigh, footsteps again, and a sloppy woosh of a broom gathering pieces in a wet puddle of tea. And sometimes, _Jesus, Marianne, don’t touch that, you’ll cut yourself, your fingers are bleeding, **look**_

She would feel sorry later. She would.

 

Within Marianne’s darkness, Dawn, the girl who never had any patience, and then had all the patience in the world, found irritation. And that makes Marianne almost laugh.

 

Almost.

 

 

The shame of being this useless, of being this helpless, of being difficult, floods all at once. From within her darkness, Marianne hurts the sunlight that is her sister, and she doesn’t want to do that.

She just wants for things to get back to normal.

But that is not possible, and she can’t drag everyone down with her.

Not on her terms.

 

 

“You need to go back to college, Dawn.”

The scratch of the fork against the plate halts in its rhythmic knocking.

“Marianne, you need me.”

She does. But she knows that if her life is ruined, it doesn’t mean that so should be Dawn’s.

The glass with water is at 2:30. She finds it there, because she put it there. Marianne has to remember where a lot of things are these days.

She takes a sip.

“No, I don’t. See?” and her lips stretch into a smile what, she hopes, doesn’t look too forced. Her pinky touches the wood first, and the bottom of the glass follows.

The table vibrates with dull knocks. Two elbows on the tabletop. “Marianne, you haven’t left home in two-“

“Don’t. I don’t wanna to know.”

The silence that follows is finally dispersed with a sigh.

 

[And this is how she knows that she won. Because it’s tired. Because it’s capitulating. Because it’s Dawn, who realizes that Marianne made up her mind, about who is going to drive the car, and order pizza and the channel they are going to watch. This is Dawn who accepts that she is grounded after running off to that party Dad found out about.

Dear sweet old Dawn.]

 

“You will need to. You’ll need to leave this apartment. And meet people. And people, they use time as a way to measure their lives.”

Because they have lives to measure with sunrises and sunsets. Marianne’s darkness steals that luxury from her.

But she lies anyway.

“I will. I promise.” Marianne bites the inside of her lower lip to keep smiling. “Just not right now.”

 

 

A week, a month, or maybe a year after braille, Marianne gets a cane.

The first time she knocks the thing against the doorframe of her apartment, she knows that silence will be no more.

Everything makes a sound: the floor, the walls, the edge of the couch as she whacks the stick against it.

It’s heavy in her hand, and Marianne thinks of it as a blessing in disguise, her hidden blade, her fangs behind brightly colored lips.

 

 

[For the first time since the accident she puts on make-up. It’s tricky and she can feel Dawn’s cringe.

“Let me just-“

“No. I have to-“

They take it all off and try again. And again. And again. Until it works.

Until Marianne can feel like she is herself. Almost.]

 

 

Time is less of an essence, when your life is measured in a number of steps you take.

From the bottom of the stairs leading to her flat, it’s something like this:

The corner coffee shop, where they sell those muffins she used to like, is 53 steps away to the left.

The grocery store is to the right, uphill, 42 steps, then wait for the signal of the pedestrian crossing, then 21 more.

The bus stop is in the same direction, 42 steps to the crossing, then right, 71. Number 3 takes her straight to the Medical Center where her therapy steals “an hour” of her existence – Dawn’s parting gift of good graces – but Marianne promised.

Fifteen steps to the steps, through the doors, 11 steps forward, turn left, seven more, the door on the right.

She is grateful she doesn’t need to remember her way back. Sunny picks her up.

He is free “Thursday afternoon”.

 

 

“ _Group, we have a newcomer._ ”


	2. A Man with a Noise

 

 

_“Group, we have a newcomer.”_

 

Marianne knows Dr Welch by his elderly voice, because it’s the sort of voice you expect a therapist to have, not too deep, but not too high, more rhythmic than melodic, and a joyful kind of calm. It grates on her nerves, makes her want to grind her teeth, to knock her cane impatiently to the tick-tock of the clock on the wall. The tea they serve here is horrendous. The only saving grace is the cookies his wife bakes, as he notified her on their original meeting.

He also tried to make her imagine his face. It included her _touching_ his face. Marianne promised herself she is _never_ doing this again.

 

“Marianne, would you like to introduce yourself?”

“Not really,” her finger twists the hoop of her cane. “Hated show-and-tell in elementary.”

Two knocks, pen against paper, and a soft chuckle by her side.

“It’s alright. Healing is a process that takes time. Everyone has his own pace. You just have to find yours. Now, who wants to start today’s session?”

And just like that, Marianne meets people. Well, not exactly. They are ghosts: bodiless voices drifting through the dark, their sorrowful laments only augmenting what she already considers a dreadful mood. Welch, much like infamous Haron on the river of the Dead, cruises between them, prodding them for information with curious attentive golden questions, sometimes getting answers, sometimes leaving empty handed, but that only forces him to prod some more.

“What about you, Irvin? Tell us, how are you faring?”

Something squeaks at her side. It’s a strange sound, and she can’t quite place it, her mind blurring whenever she tries to think of it.

“I thought we made a deal that ye won’t be calling me that, _Thomas_.”

This is a change, accent heavy on her ears. Foreigner. Her mind fills with a soft wailing of bagpipes, blood-red and forest-green kilts flapping, as the man with a Scottish tongue grumbles to himself. She can tell, this sort of thing happens every time, as Welch corrects himself.

“Yes, of course, _Bog_. Now tell us, what is your poison of the day?”

“Being here?”

Marianne’s stomach flexes with a silent huff. Welch’s frustration is as light and fleeting as a ray of sun bursting through the clouds on a grey day. Blink and you’ll miss it, but she can feel it all the way across the room.

“The usual then. Maybe next time.”

“Maybe next time,” her neighbor snarls, “we’ll be able to get a decent cup of brew around here.”

She bites her lip and fixes her sunglasses that try to slip down her nose. Perhaps there is some use to these after all.

 

 

On her fourth Thursday it rains. The weather decides to betray her, snow turning to sleet and everything is muddied, her knocking turning watery as she tries to get to the therapy session. Some woman is kind enough to get her on the bus, and Marianne is sure that her face stays red with anger and embarrassment even as she crosses the footstep of the room, Welch kindly taking her coat.

She wants to nod and just get to her chair – 10 o’clock, 8 steps – when he coughs softly behind her back.

“Marianne, your sweater is backwards.”

She curses through her teeth, jaw stiffening. “Hold this.” Parting with her cane, trusted into Welch’s uncertain grasp, Marianne grips the back of her sweater and pulls it over her head, material ruffling her hair. Something falls, judging by the sound, her glasses – she keeps forgetting about them, why does she keep wearing these things, big and clunky (she knows why, but she will never admit it) – but her hands are too busy trying the find the label, that’s supposed to be on sewn on the inside.

Only when she pulls the sweater back, the right way, her hair not just messy but also static, she recognizes the squeaking sound that stops near her.

“Ye dropped these,” he says, strangely from below, but she stretches her hand towards the voice, and another, large and narrow, puts her shades into her palm, fingers tickling her pulse before pulling away with a clink.

“Thanks,” she palpates them, checking for damage, and finding none, plopping them where they belong.

“Thank you, Mr King,” Welch presses the back of his hand against hers – asking for permission, a basic courtesy when one is blind, but Marianne can’t quite get around people touching her so casually – and she turns hers to grasp his wrist, letting him guide her. “Now please, take your seat. We are starting in a few minutes.”

There is a silent exchange happening, she understands, when her cane finds its way to her, trusty as ever. Welch pulls her, pressure at her arm, till the end clanks against the metal of chair’s leg and her hand is placed firmly on its back. She plops herself on it, hand gliding through her hair that stands up in places, electricity shooting into her skin.

This time she misses the sound, because the voice comes back, and it’s heavier than before, yet somehow, same sort of seemingly estranged. “Tea?”

The cane barely manages not to slip from between her knees where she holds it, when she jumps in her seat. She scrambles to catch it, still flustered from her own unabashed display of personal negligence.

“What?”

“Tea,” repeats the voice, mildly unhinged for some reason. “Ah noticed that you drink tea. Here.”

And the fingers touch again, hooking into hers, gruff skin, short stubby nails, and the warm bottom of a styrofoam cup is placed in the middle of her palm.

“Oh,” her eyebrows betray her, rising like a flock of disturbed birds. “Thank you ..?”

The rising vapor tickles her nostrils. Hot liquid, as bad as before, bitter and tasting of hay and artificial flavoring, touches her lips and rolls in a stream of boiling water down her throat, and Marianne gulps with a small cringe.

“One day,” she says to no one in particular, but hoping that the man with a foreign accent listens. “This place will have good tea. Not today, but a girl can dream.”

She is answered with a laugh, small yet vibrant, with deep throaty undertones, and her head turns towards it, a habit from another life, but she is too late to chastise herself for it.

The man doesn’t seem to mind. “Yes, we all can dream.”

Welch cuts them off right there, with his greetings and introductions and question. Marianne presses the cup to her chest – it might taste horrible but it’s still releasing warmth – feeling its heat against her breastbone.

 

Something is born there, something that she hesitantly gives a name to. It’s small and bright, and very weak, so she wraps it in the covers of doubt it produces, and locks it away, where no one can take it from her.

 

When she gets home, after another bout of her own stubborn muteness and her neighbor’s attitude and Welch’s fruitless attempts to get them to cooperate, Marianne pulls it out, this small feeling, tugs on it, uncovering it from all the casual details of the day, from all the sounds and noises and looks at it, the only way a blind person can, with a cup of good tea in her hand and her TV blabbing in the background about upcoming presidential race.

Only then she allows herself to smile. Only then she considers bringing the man a decent cup of coffee, so that maybe, he’ll find this glimmering light as well.

 

 

It’s a seventh Thursday. She is ten minutes late for the session, but she doesn’t regret it one bit. In her hand there is a cup from the coffee shop 53 steps away from her home, but she is not sorry. Dawn drives her – she doesn’t have classes today, Marianne doesn’t mind, she can hear the difference in her sister’s voice, the joy and passion with which she speaks of her courses and the people and that Sunny asked her if they could move in together next year, and Marianne knows she did the right thing, probably for the first time in her life.

 

“Since when did you start drinking coffee?” she asks, her chattering making Marianne too concerned for the other drivers on the road than for her own wellbeing, fingers grabbing the safety belt.

“I didn’t,” she replies, word drawn through shut teeth when the car takes a sharp turn. The feeling of floating and claws ripping through her skin surfaces but she pushes it right back down.

They stop at the red light, the faint beeps of the pedestrian crossing piercing through the window, their engine still purring. “Then why get coffee? I remember that time you had to drink it to get pass the finals week and-” Dawn gasps. “Is this for someone else? Surely not for Doc Welch, is it? I don’t judge, but he is old. And married.”

“Drive the car, Dawn. And it’s not for Welch.”

The engine roared, and Marianne lets go of the belt to grab by her right hand the handle instead.

“You’ve got to tell me!”

“No, I don’t. It’s nothing really.” Another sharp turn. “I swear one day, they will take your license away.”

And then they are stopping sharply, and Marianne can’t breath.

“We’re here. Ten minutes late but-“ The movement at the driver’s seat indicates that Marianne’s stoic expression does nothing. “Are you okay? You are white.”

“I’m fine,” she croaks, stomach twisting. “I need to get out of the car.”

Thankfully, Dawn doesn’t ask any more questions. She gets out, keys clanking, and runs around the car to open the passenger seat.

“Are you sure?”

She isn’t. “Yeah, I just got nauseous.”

Her feet touch the ground, stick knocking against the edge of the sidewalk. Smell of gasoline invades her nose with each heavy breath she takes. Emotions thunder in her body, and Marianne bundles them up into a buzzing ball and stuffs them away for later inspection, and instead focuses on the cup, warm and calming and surprisingly intact in her hand after the rough ride she had.

Dawn’s hand is on her elbow and helps her get up.

“Want me to walk you?”

“No. I think I know how to get up the stairs now.” Her foot nudges the first one. “I’m crippled, but not that crippled.”

One confident step, a wide swipe of the cane against the ground. “Pick me up in an hour.”

 

She is late, but Welch doesn’t sound pissed off. He takes her to her seat.

“Glad you could join us today, Marianne. We were worried if something happened.”

“I’m fine,” but her hand, uncertain, fixes her fringe, another old habit dying hard.

“That’s great.” Welch has a unique way of walking, a mix of crisp step followed by a half-second drag and another crisp step, heel clicking against the floor tiles. “Bog was about to share with us his worries.”

“Not really,” replies her neighbor, but he sounds pleasantly content.

“Oh well. Eva?”

Marianne catches her breath and counts till three before releasing it. “Here,” she pushes the cup in the direction of the squeaking that insistently follows him around.

She is fully aware she is making a laughing stock out of herself. The gruff neighbor moves, his clothing rustling.

Eva spins her story of misery, boyfriend crashing down with his small plane, but Marianne doesn’t listen. She heard that story five times already, it doesn’t get any better. And it doesn’t matter right now. What matters is a confused silence by her side, followed by a cough.

“What’s… that?”

“Coffee,” and her arm starts going numb, tense and outstretched. “There is only that much woe I can take. Can’t deal with most of it, but coffee seems to be the easy one. Now take the bloody thing before my arm falls off.”

He does, hand around her wrist, hand on the cup, and the weight is gone.

“Why?”

“Because when you are blind, people feel obliged to do things for you. You weren’t. And neither am I.”

The man doesn’t answer. The plastic lid slips of, and she can catch the fragrance of coffee beans, burned and boiled.

“You seem like the straight black kinda guy.”

“You guessed right.”

He sniffs and drinks, teeth scratching against the cup, and Marianne feels her hands get restless, so she pulls her glasses off, and starts wiping them with her shirt. Her fringe falls over her face. A haircut is probably in order.

“That’s some good coffee,” says the man, satisfied purr to his words, and she bows her head even more. Her mouth demands for a smile. She bargains with a smirk.

“Oh joy.”

“Bog, Marianne, would you like to share with the group the nature of your discussion?”

It’s like being in school again, she thinks. Except that you are allowed to eat during the lesson.

“No,” she answers. “But I would like to share something else.”

Marianne is fully aware that everyone is looking at her. She doesn’t have to see to know that. Her fingers fumble with her glasses some more. The knot inside her tightens and she pokes at it with trepidation, as it starts to unwind, like a blooming flower, and there is nothing she can do about it now, words being pushed out like there is no more place for them inside her chest.

“I’m afraid of riding on the front seat.”

“And why is that?”

Welch’s question is the right kind of careful and tentative. It’s enough: the man knows what he is doing. Marianne closes her eyes.

The glass breaks. She flies. She falls.

“Because I feel like one wrong move – and I’ll go crashing through the windshield.”


	3. So What

 

 

Marianne doesn’t remember much of the session after that. There were some more questions, and she gave some answers, but the darkness ate them whole, swallowed them down into its abyss, where her dreams now rest, broken and forgotten. Dead. But she rebuilds, slowly, and these sessions work after all.

 

[She comes home, lies on the sofa and thinks. About people she never knew existed until her world came rolling through the car window. About the pain and suffering and sorrow that can crash upon someone, anyone, nobody in particular, and make them into somebody new. And that she, too, can be new. She just has to pick herself up first.]

 

“Are you alright?” she comes around to the familiar voice, cracking. If stubble had a sound, that would be it.

“Yeah, I’m… okay.” What Marianne realizes, is that she didn’t put her glasses back on during the whole hour. She rectifies it, urgently. “That was coming for a while now.” His sound, like old joints rubbing against each other, comes closer, and Marianne smiles in its general direction. “Maybe next time will be your time.”

“Maybe.”

People walk pass them, leaving. Perhaps so should she.

She stands up, her chair rattling as it’s pushed back, when the door opens.

“Marianne! Are you here?”

And her world comes falling down leaving her standing in absolute ringing silence, through which his voice stabs her, repeatedly, straight in the chest.

“Marianne!” Words fail her, exploding in shards of glass, cutting at her throat. Hand grabs her arm, pulls, twists, grips to bruises, shaking. “The hell is wrong with you?!”

“What?” she mutters, because she knows who it is. She can’t find a single reason for him being here.

“You ask _me_?” he keeps shaking her, and it’s disorientating to say the least. Marianne finds her bearing enough to place her hand against his chest – he is messy, he never was so messy – and shoves him away. “Your senile old man is suing me!”

Dad. Talk about unnecessary.

“Roland, leave me alone.”

“Leave you alone?! First your father fires me, and now he is suing me! And it’s your fault!”

He used to have a smile, she suddenly remembers, that could light up the whole room. Everyone liked him. He was charming and bold and entertaining. Perhaps that’s what made him so captivating, like a flame she continued to burn herself on repentantly.

She could see light in him. Well, not anymore. Now all the light is gone, like a mirage, a mask.

Funny thought, in the dark, where you can’t see the pretenses, he is the truest he ever was.

“My fault?” Her voice is meek at first, a distant reminder of things buried, but it grows, sprouting fiery wings, and rises. “ _My fault?!_ ”

Her grip on the handle of her cane becomes almost painful.

“I can’t **see** , you **fucker**!” And the next moment, her cane comes swinging in his general direction and hits hard against something, probably his leg, judging by him groan of pain. Even if she wanted to, she can’t stop. The swings won’t stop, and she basks in them, her anger and pain pouring out till her voice becomes a scream of agony, punctuated by the mauling she gives him. “ **I. CAN’T. SEE.** ”

His body hits the ground, a thud that vibrates into the soles of her shoes. There are scurrying footsteps, Welch’s urgent talking to someone, hands pulling her away, as she buckles.

Roland moves on the floor.

“It was an **accident**!”

“IT WAS. Because you couldn’t drive at the speed limit! In a fog!”

There are people holding her back, hands on her arms and across her torso. Deep male voices of security, “Sir, you have to come with us” saving his sorry ass. Roland brushes off his clothes, “Shove off, I can get up get up on my own”, as something is slapped away, his voice trembling with embarrassment.

“Your whole family is crazy. My life is ruined because you had to make a scene!”

“You were my fiancé, Roland! And still, you slept with every single secretary in the firm, you fucking asshole!”

She is half-ready for excuses, him finding a room to wiggle out of her well-grounded accusation, and yet he doesn’t. He is cold and hard, with a piercing sneer. Her cane almost slips from her hand.

“So what.”

_So… what._ All the lies come back, bruising with technicolor, vivid in her memory like they happened yesterday.

 

“I mean really, Marianne. What did you expect? You were not much to look at, even before you got those disgusting scars on your face.”

_You are a cutie, Marianne. Such a sweet little thing. But you really should do something about that hair._

 

“How quaint, daddy’s big girl is artsy, always babbling about this photographer or that painting, too busy running that gallery of hers.”

_I’m boring you, aren’t I?_

_I can listen to you talk forever. Let’s hear about how perfect my hair is again._

 

“Pity, really, I had such high hopes for that partnership your father promised me after our marriage.”

 

_Marrying you would make me a luckiest guy in the world. You_ will _marry me,_ right _?_

 

“Sir, you need to leave. Right now.”

“Oh, I am.”

The world grows back up. But it is hot and trembling, and it shakes her, floor dancing under her feet. She lets herself to be held up, while she wonders what to throw at him. Not her cane, surely. She needs her cane. It’s certainly worth more than he is.

Marianne misses an opening door, and Roland’s gasp – “Oh, Dawn! It’s like a mecca of spoiled little girls in here-“ surprises her no less than her sister’s presence during this little confession does him.

Dawn slaps Roland’s face.

“Do not come close to my sister ever again, you… _filth_.”

Her sister is livid with anger, and Marianne regrets not being able to see her face. Dawn is frightening in her fury, a reminder of their mother, so calm and loving until you push the wrong buttons. Dawn must be quite a sight, since Roland is lost for words, for once.

“Leave. **Now**.”

A stray thought that if Roland hurts Dawn, she would kill him, right there on a spot crosses her mind - She would probably not be able to go to this therapy anymore, too bad, she was starting to enjoy it – but a laugh, deep and throaty and familiar, but still surprising, flanks her.

“What are you laughing at, cripple?” Roland descends into a hiss.

“Oh, just the sight of a grown man being beaten by wee lasses tickles my funny bone.” Marianne would have considered being uppity about the level of condescension he projected, but it seemed like it wasn’t addressed to her at all. “Adding insult to the injury, so to say.”

“OH, Fuck Off.”

If Marianne knew how to laugh, she would have done so. Roland storms away and out, accompanied by other footsteps, heavier, when her sister’s clicking heels rush at her.

“Marianne, are you alright? I arrived and I saw his car and I didn’t know what to do! I-“

Hands on her arms, slim and soft, Dawn was always high on embraces.

“I just want to go home.”

“Yeah, sure. Sunny-“

 

 

It’s a blur.

 

 

Marianne thinks she was used to being upset by now. But it was an illusion that she created for herself. Guess it’s true, if you say that you’re _good_ long enough, you start to believe it. But you are not, you never are.

So why do it?

 

“Are you okay?” Dawn repeats, guiding her into her flat, and Marianne drops her cane on the floor.

“No.”

Her fingers push against the wall, here’s the bathroom door, then pass the corner, the living room. Straight to the bedroom, right to the kitchen.

“I can stay for the night if you need me-“

“Go home, Dawn.”

Her sister shuffles by the entrance. She picks up her stick, setting it against the wall with a distinct clang.

“I’ll call dad. This is unacceptable. I don’t know how he found out about your therapy sessions, he must be following you-“

“Dawn.” Marianne knows she wants nothing but to help, but it’s too much. “Do whatever you want. Just leave me alone.”

“Marianne-“

“If I’m ever to get better, I need to do this on my own. I need-“ And her voice starts breaking, betraying her. “I need to do this alone. No more therapy. No more help.”

Hands wrap around her again. Dawn presses her nose against her shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

Of course she is crying.

“I know.” Marianne pats her hand. “I know. But enough of that now.”

 

 

Marianne never liked pills.

Even as a child, being sick was an adventure of its own, with her mother’s worried sighs as Marianne spit out her meds into her hand, and choked on the syrups.

Doctors hated her. She was the worst patient, demanding to know every single thing, asking for a hundred of opinions, and in the end settling on a painkiller, forcefully shoved down her throat, because she could walk everything off. Colds, cramps, pulled muscles, you name it.

Apparently depression was not one of them.

She had a prescription, she did. It stood, unopened, in the mirror cabinet in the bathroom for god knows how long now.

It’s been a week since the unwanted meeting with Roland, but Marianne could tell only by the incessant babbling of TV in the background as she fell in and out of sleep on the couch. Dawn kept bringing her food, the shelves of her fridge filling over night, but whenever she woke up, there was no one there, her apartment as blissfully empty as before. Not that she ate any of it. Bread and water. Her body didn’t take anything else.

But here she was, pecking on a slice of wholegrain, while the water ran before her, bottle of pills in her hand. It rattled when shaken.

Fuck it.

She was supposed to take two, probably. At least that’s what the prescription said in tiny dots, that she stabbed her finger against at least three times to figure out what they meant.

Out of seven days, her limbs kept shaking in waves of anxiety for the past three.

So she took four.

They came down her throat in a lump of chemical bile, and she ate over them, stuffing the rest of the slice into her mouth.

Her back leaned against the bathroom wall, and she slid down it. The tiles were cold.

Her eyes closed. And as a trigger, sleep fell over her, unhindered by her ringing phone, an eerie cheery tune Dawn set up.

 

 

The pills were working. A night on the bathroom floor brings even the numbest of minds into perspective - even if it’s your own bathroom.

Marianne knows Dawn saw her, because there is a cover thrown over her, and when she wakes the kitchen is alive with the sounds of a pot boiling, and something frying and her sister’s voice arguing with someone on the phone.

She makes her way there with a heavy head, through TV silence, thoughts mumbled into messy pile.

“Dawn?”

The shambling stops.

“Oh, Marianne! Good morning. Scrambled or sunny-side-up?”

“What?”

She is being pushed down on the chair, duvet wrapped around her.

“Your eggs. Scrambled or-“

“I heard you the first time. What are you doing here?”

The chair moves before her across the table.

“First, your pills. Saucer, 12:30. Water, 14:00.”

They were. But she was not in a hurry.

“Dawn, I asked for privacy-“

“You know,” Dawn has a tone that mom used to have, calm and composed, and yet commanding. Motherly, that’s the best way to describe it. “You know, it’s been bothering me for a week now. The person you bought coffee for.”

Not that. Please. But it seemed like it was just the beginning for her sister.

“I completely forgot about it because of the one who shall not be named-“

“Roland is not Lord Voldemort.”

“ _Shall not be Named_. But last night I got a call from Welch, because you didn’t show up, and he told me the most curious thing.”

So that’s what that yesterday’s call was. Marianne’s head was ringing.

Four pills were probably too many after all.

“Welch told me that the group was asking about you. They were worried.”

“Why would they-“

“Because the blind girl who beats up a man with her cane makes an impression. A good and enforcing, even if morally dubious, impression.”

On it’s own volition, the corner of her mouth twitches. She didn’t know her face was still capable of that.

“That’s what it took? Me beating up a guy?”

“Yes!” The excitement in Dawn’s voice was so violent, Marianne had to lean back. “But most importantly, I remembered the guy, the one with an accent, and how he had a very familiar coffee cup in his hands.”

“Dawn, come on-“

“No. I will not _come on_.”

And this is when Marianne realizes that she was too late. She was too late to push people away, push Dawn away, because she already changed her. Old Dawn never told her _no_. Well, she did, a cheeky brat that she was, but never like that, like she is putting her fist down, and she _is_ putting her fist down, plates and forks and saucers dancing with a chime.

“There was a girl I knew,” she says, something like carefully-crafted conviction in her voice. “Her name was Marianne. She had this smile, and she put on the strangest make-up, which everyone questioned, and had a weird sense of fashion, but she didn’t give two shits about it. She majored in talking about boring paintings and she could talk her brain out about those paintings like it was nobody’s business. And then she had the shiniest eyes when she did.”

_Had_ , Marianne wants to say. But instead she says:

“So what happened to her?”

“She fell in love with a guy who broke her. Who took her, with her smile and shining eyes, and tried to twist her in a shape that suited him better. Because she was better than him and he was mediocre in everything except for his looks. But looks can’t carry you far, and they tend to faint, and he knew that. So he twisted her until she almost forgot what she was, and she let him, because she loved him. None of this was her fault.”

“But-“

“None of this was her fault!” Saucers zing again. “He never knew what moderation was, _never_ , so it was a matter of time before he twisted too hard and she broke. And fell down, discarded, because now _she_ was not good enough, and all he wanted is perfection without understanding what perfection was.”

Her breathing is rigged with sobs that she tries to hide, façade cracking. Marianne could imagine her tears, rolling down her round light face, straight out of those clear blue eyes, and how she wipes them off with the back of her hand, biting away her sniffles, trying to be tough.

Crybaby.

“But what does that have to do with that coffee? Which was a courtesy gift, by the way.”

Marianne doesn’t realize that Dawn is standing up until her chair is pulled again, legs scraping on the floor.

“Because last Thursday, when I was standing by that coffeeshop down the street, wondering what on earth I was going there, I saw that girl again, with her make-up, and a cup of coffee in her hand. And I knew it was her, because she had that smile on her face, that could blind the sun itself.”

Huh. She didn’t even notice.

“I know it’s difficult, and I know that I will never understand what it’s like, to be you, I never could, because you are my older sister Marianne, who is loud, and strong, even when you think you are weak, and no one could ever do you wrong, except someone did, and now you act like that girl we both know never existed. But I know she does. And she knows the name of that guy she got a coffee for. And I don’t know why she haven’t asked him out yet, for a coffee or something.”

Marianne doesn’t answer. Her pills are at 12:30 and her water is at 14:00. This time it’s easier, and the water is just the right kind of fresh, and she didn’t know she was this thirsty. This alive.

Her sister still looms, with heavy nose-breathing and table scratching.

“Please say something.”

Marianne wants to smile, but this calls for a straight face for just a moment longer.

“How long did it take you to write this speech?”

A snigger.

“A whole week. I even have a paper here, an honest to god cheat-sheet.”

Something rustles, shaken.

“Did Sunny cry when you rehearsed?

“Wept like a baby.”

“Good. It was a great speech. You should be proud.” She fixes her plate, her fork, and herself, fingers passing by the scars on her face to rearrange her hair, not that it would ever help. The smile, though. The smile’s back, crooked, shy. Old. “I’ll have my eggs now. Scrambled.”

Dawn starts up, fridge door opening, butter crackling, melting.

And within all that, Marianne says:

“ _His name is Bog_.”


	4. Is that what we do now?

 

 

“ _Hi._ ”

 

Surprisingly, she almost forgot about him.

It’s hard to believe it, but it was a week, and that was a week of Dawn on her Easter break, busy and loud in her kitchen, but new, with her clothes and beauty tips and if the world didn’t have colors, at least, at least, it had shapes and forms and volume and texture.

Dawn dragged her to shop and kept an open mind to Marianne’s questionable fashion choices. Marianne never thought she’d say that, but she never loved her sister more.

 

“I thought I was early.” New shirt feels _new_ , and maybe slightly itchy.

“You are.”

The awkward silence falls. Marianne has to admit, she missed this, somewhat, the way how her voice faintly bounces off the walls of the room, how the back of the folding chair digs into her spine. She was never early for these meetings, she realizes. Because they were just therapy sessions before this day.

A gust of air brushes her face, and she tries to figure out why, when something jingles, before her, and she thinks of the golden chain on her late mother’s wrists, a small charm on it, butterfly glimmering with purple enamel. It’s now on her own wrist, and twisting the little trinket saved her from many a bad habit.

“Are you… waving a hand before my face?”

The jiggle retracts, spooked.

“Oh, sorry. I just… thought…” He is looking for a word that is a good one. She helps him.

“Yes, I’m that blind. No, I didn’t see that.”

He hums. “Then the last time was even more impressive.”

“Saw what I did to that guy?” She perks up. Somehow, somewhere, that incident, that little victory, became her personal call-back. She just needs to find the right angle to look at it. “You keep this up with hand-waving and your shins are next.”

He is unfazed. “My shins now belong to the National Railway. But if you want to fight them for it, be my guest, I’m not going to stop you.”

She laughs before she can stop herself, before she gets what he is saying.

“You,” there is surely a more eloquent way to say so, but she doesn’t know it. “Don’t have legs.”

“I don’t.” But he doesn’t seem angry. But sarcastic - that’s a different story. “I thought the wheelchair was a giveaway.”

“The wheelchair?”

The squeaking returns, the sound like old machinery, badly oiled, coming from his side. She doesn’t know what she is doing, but seeing is believing, and there is only one way she can see. Her hand stretches towards him, searching.

Something touches it, guiding, and her nails scratch against the ribbed resin of the narrow wheels.

She is a moron who can’t see. But Dawn can. And Welch does. Why didn’t anyone…

“Oh,” she pulls away. “ _I see_.”

“You,” he stutters to a pause, “ _see_?”

The moment and the unfortunate wording hangs between them, and the next she is laughing, loud, unabridged, strangely satisfied. It just spits out of her, uncontrollably, and she tries to cover her mouth with her hand, but even that doesn’t work, she just knocks her glasses on her lap instead.

“I didn’t mean… You said…” he mumbles, confused.

Tears prickle her eyes. She wipes them away, tries to put her eyewear back on. The laugh can’t quite get enough of her, rocking her back and forth.

“ **Wow** ,” her words are less words but coughs and deep breaths, ”Surprise. Sight jokes just got funny.”

“You’ve got to be… _pulling my leg_ ,” he blurs, and no, apparently she was not done yet, but now _both of them_ are laughing, because holy hell, this is horrible and inappropriate and stupid, and yes, apparently their sense of humor just got an upgrade. Of a macabre sardonic kind.

“Marianne,” she says, and rubs her face with her hand, and stabs the other at him.

“Bog,” he shakes it, wheels of his chair turning, creaking up a storm, and it must be really old. “Oh, almost forgot.”

He moves, and something cup-shaped is placed in her hand.

“Tea,” he says, and her eyebrows fly up.

“Is that what we do now?” But before he can answer, she tugs on the cup. “I can _roll with that_.”

Bog chuckles. “Let’s _see_ how that works out.”

And for some reason her stupid heart leaps. She presses a cup over it and listens to Welch’s uneven footsteps, and lively greeting.

“It’s good to have you back,” he says.

“I like me back,” she replies.

 

 

Marianne knows about the five-stages-of-grief bullshit Welch tends to talk about, but knowing about it doesn’t make it true, and it’s not like it is supposed to work for everyone. Because some of those stages don’t make sense to her, there is no way possible that she can convince herself she is not blind, no matter how stubborn she is, Marianne can’t will herself into seeing, and Bog can’t will himself into growing a new pair of legs. You can’t bargain, and no prayers work – not because she didn’t try.

And if they are stages, then they are bloody crickets, hopping back and forth, and some days are good, and some days she wakes up and sees the ceiling of her bedroom, a spider web on the lamp, but before she can make a sound, she wakes up again, for real, and the nothing is back. And on some days, words, bitter and corrosive like acid, melt her teeth and burn her throat, and she lets them fly out in spits of sentences, at Welch, at the floor of the medical center, and they all listen to her talk, with almost reverence, like she is giving a sermon.

On one of those days, when she swears after a rant, a sharp _fuck_ of exhaustion and frustration, Bog, a cup of coffee in his hand, and it’s still in his hand, because it cracks when he squeezes it, and it pleads mercy, says:

“My mother wants me to get prosthetics.”

Welch drops his pen. He picks it up, urgently, but someone claps – and claps are a sign, or acceptance, of a breakthrough, or a personal victory. And Marianne wants to clap as well, but Bog asks them to stop.

“Don’t. I’m not getting prosthetics.”

“Why so?” Welch is professional enough to be collected.

“First, they are bloody expensive. And second, I don’t see the point.”

“Don’t you want to walk, Bog?”

Her neighbor makes some sort of a gesture with a jingle of his bracelet, and she tries to figure out what it is. She never considered how much she depended on facial expressions. It’s absolutely unnerving.

“I have my chair. Not that I have anywhere to go.”

“Prosthetics provide a wider range of mobility-“

“No.” And he gulps. “Topic closed.”

 

 

“There is seriously nowhere you want to go?”

They are walking towards the exit after the session – she strides, and he rolls by her side, cane hitting his chair occasionally. Somehow, these walks take longer and longer each time they do them.

“Do _you_?” He stops and she almost stumbles over him.

“Well,” Marianne ponders for a moment. She walks places, her steps counted almost unconsciously now, but to actually go somewhere… “Yeah, I do.”

“Like where?” He huffs, incredulous.

“Like… That Picasso exhibition they have right now.”

“But you…”

“Blind, yeah. _I know_.” She is not upset. Upset is not a word she would use. More like _salty_. “Doesn’t mean that I don’t want it.”

Her life story is not a secret for them now, unlike his, she knows next to nothing about him still, but it’s alright. He will tell – maybe, probably, she hopes he will – when he is ready. But she won’t be the one with pliers pulling it out.

His chair is moving again, she learned that there are more sounds to it than she originally noticed – his bracelet keeps hitting the frame as he glides his hands over the side-rail, and the seat creaks a little when he moves back and forth – but she starts walking again behind him.

They reach the door. It slides open.

She asked him once if he needed help getting up the stairs. He didn’t reply at first, Marianne imagined him making a face – which is difficult when you don’t have a clue about what the person you are talking to looks like, but she still doesn’t feel comfortable asking to touch his visage, they are not that familiar – before he sighed that there’s such things as ramps and he’s been doing this long enough to learn how to go down one. She almost slapped herself on the face.

“You must have really liked art,” he says, but it’s like he is talking to himself, and Marianne wonders what is it that _he_ misses. There must be something.

Across the road, by the entrance of the park that Marianne found out only when Dawn dragged her out for Easter market, a car honks.

“That’s my ride,” but he sounds disappointed, or she makes herself believe that he is.

“Yeah, mine should be here soon-“

“What sort of tea do you like?” he asks out of the blue, and then adds, as if he needs to expand on everything he does in relation to her. “I don’t know why it took me so long to ask, since we’ve been doing this for whatever long. Hindsight. Sorry.”

“Just black. It’s fine.” Her lips purse. “But a bit of sugar won’t hurt.”

“Sugar. Got it.”

And he is off, an older female voice calling to him, and him responding with annoyed “you didn’t need to pick me up, that’s what those two idiots do” and Marianne just stands there until Sunny jolts her with “That’s the guy?” and “I swear I’ve seen him somewhere before”.

 

 

For the next meeting Bog has a tea for her that is 50% sugar, and Marianne wonders if it’s possible to get diabetes, and if it will make her life more difficult she got that as well.

But more importantly, the cardboard sleeve of her cup reads “Marianne” in fat dots of braille like someone spend considerable time borrowing into the material, and it’s actually rather sweet of him, but not as sweet as the bloody tea.

He reads her joyful discontent, and reacts the same way he does to any other mixture of her emotions: with confusion and self-deprecation (it’s a weird part of his character, she notices; somehow, paradoxically, he is both self-assured at the world but cripplingly uncertain in every aspect related to her; it’s a miracle)

“You don’t like it,” his voice falls, while Welch mumbles on.

“My cavities sure will,” but her fingers can’t stop touching the punctures of her name. “Nice touch. You win cookie points.”

“Cookie points? Are you five?”

“You can’t tell?”

“Bog, Marianne, you can talk to each other after the meeting.”

That’s the end of it. Marianne has her name in her hands, and when she clutches it her mother’s bracelet jingles.

 

 

But it’s not.

“I have it,” Bog notifies her. “The place where I want to go. But it’s some distance away.”

The session is over and the footsteps dissolve until they are alone and leaving, just like any other time.

But unlike all the other times, there is not even a shade of doubt in her mind if this is good decision, if this is a viable option. She just knows.

“Let’s do it. Hold my cane.”

She scrambles off the chair, a shuffling step before her knee hits the rim of the wheel, and a hand lands against her hip, making sure she doesn’t knock them both over.

“Do what?”

“Adventuring,” she throws her cane over his lap, and sidesteps around, fingers catching the handles of the wheelchair.

“Pray tell, how do you see that working out?” but the sound of tapping, cane against the floor, brings a smirk to her lips.

“Easy. I’ll be your legs, you’ll be my eyes. Deal?”

He doesn’t say a thing. Marianne wonders, briefly, if this sort of familiarity is a sensitive matter. She hides her growing awkwardness behind brash attitude and lame jokes.

“Man, if you haven’t noticed, I’m not good with gestures, or facial expressions. Speak up.”

Air rushes out of his nose with a puff. “ _Let’s do it_.”

She presses down on the handles, turning the chair towards where she thinks the exit is. “First rule of navigation: I operate on a clock. You say three o-clock, I-“

“Turn ninety degrees to the right. Got it.”

 

 


	5. Where would you like to go?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: mentions of attempted suicide

 

 

He takes her to the flipping museum. She recognizes the smell, of invisible dust, and wooden tiled floor, and oils, dying under artificial lighting, which sometimes is bad, because _sometimes_ , even in big museums, they don’t know how to light things properly.

“Really,” she says, but all those smells, the sounds of echoed footsteps are here, in her, and she is _home_.

“Yes,” and the taps of her cane are guiding her forward, and the inner clock makes her stop and look, no, _listen_ , to the quiet whispers around her, of awe and contemplation, in search for meaning.

He doesn’t know the sort of torture he is submitting himself for, because she keeps asking him to stop in front of every single work and describe it to her, in detail, but he does so, without a whine, and maybe just an occasional frustrated sigh, but she knows the main exposition of ModArt better that she knows the layout of her apartment, and by the end she guesses the names before he has a chance to say them, and just asks him: “What do you think?”

He rubs his hands – an interesting habit, a dry sound of skin against skin – and replies angrily that he has no bloody idea.

So she tells him what _she_ thinks and he listens with quiet breaths. And she talks and talks and talks until her throat stings like she is swallowing sandpaper, and if words were water there would be waterfalls out of the windows, and they all would be drowning, but he listens so she talks, and when she stops talking, she asks:

“Now, where would _you_ like to go?”

 

 

The water moves before them. She tries to remember its color, or imagine the color it could be, bluish green, a mirror surface, uneasy with leaves floating on it, as it reflects the sky. Instead, under her recent impression, she thinks of Monet, how his ponds were so very crystal clear yet murky, and how lilies bloomed in oil splashes, fresh and clean and joyfully pure.

 

“I used to come here with my father,” Bog confesses, when she settles on the edge of the bench. “You know, it freezes in winter.”

 

She remembers coming here with Dawn once, dashing through the snow because they always organize an ice skating ring and Dawn loves everything that involves large crowds of people bumping into each other. Every major holiday is Dawn’s holiday.

 

“I used to put on my skates and just cut around till the dark, and Mother, _Mom_ , she gave us a lashing because I always came home with a running nose.” He chuckles. “I caught so many colds as a child.” Bog grunts. “Not that it stopped me. I think,” his fingers scratch the armrests, “I’ve never had enough of a reason to quit. Skating was the most liberating experience of my life. The most real.”

“Were you good at it?”

“Some say yes. I say I could have been better.”

“What’s it like?”

“What, you didn’t have enough of me talking today?”

No, not by a long shot. “Tell me.”

“It’s a lot of falling. Again, and again, and again, until you’re covered with bruises, and everything hurts. But,” he moves and his chair pleads under him. “When you stop falling, you start flying. And you wonder why would you ever walk again.”

Something is wrong, he is too pensive, so she plugs in her two bits.

“I tried skating. But apparently I was born with two left feet. Few steps and I’m in a snow bank. Worked like a charm every single time.”

“Can’t imagine.”

“I’m serious!” She turns, her body twisting. “I know my amazingness is blinding, but I used to be the clumsiest kid.” Her hand lands on his shoulder, and it’s _wide_. “I had a helmet. Mom put it on me, it was pink with glitter, but not for long, because I fell down so often.”

Bog goes rigid, the angle of his arm warm and breathing, and then he curls onto himself. “Jesus Christ Fuck, Marianne.”

 

She brushes off, at first, but then touches right back. Except now it’s his back, and his jacket is very soft, and trembling, because he is… laughing? She has no idea, he is certainly doing something.

“What? What did I say?”

He straightens but the noises don’t stop, and earthquake of his form making her even more intrigued than before. He shakes his head, and her fingers grab his collar.

“If you don’t stop, Imma gonna touch your face to find out what’s going on. And you don’t know things I touched today.”

 

Bog hiccups. Yep, he asked for it.

 

She leans forward, her hip bumping the chair, and she turns his face towards her. He has a narrow jaw, she finds, and somehow, that surprises her. She tried to imagine him, the coffee man, since Dawn’s descriptions were non-conclusive – “he’s… okay? In a weirdly attractive kind a way” – but a narrow face with a sharp chin was not one of those things she came up with. Bog does not show any signs of discomfort, except for ceased shaking, so her hands start to wander. High cheekbones, those she foresaw, and coarse short-ish hair, thick and messy. High forehead, hard set eyebrows, moving under her touch-

 

“You have a looong nose.”

 

\- and then his lips, she expects them to be thin and rough, but they are nothing like it, soft, malleable, parted with rough lines and a sarcastic

“Haven’t heard _that one_ before”

and she shifts further, to the large caverns of his ears, flat against his head, and his long thin neck, before this would start being awkward, or more so than it already is.

 

“Are you happy now?” he sneers.

 

And it’s a stupid question, is she supposed to have a life-changing light shine upon her from knowing his face, happy is not a good word to describe them, even when they laugh they are not happy, content at most. Now she just knows, she is assured that he is not another ghost anymore, he is more tangible than an occasional pair of hands, and pair of wheels against her knees, and Marianne could do with that.

And if she thinks about it like that, then yes, she is happy. They’re fucked-up kind of happy.

 

“Are _you_?”

 

For the longest time, he doesn’t say. But when her hands cup his face again, they turn wet. She doesn’t pull them away.

 

“Not for a while, no.”

 

Marianne has a lot of questions but none of them seem appropriate. So she just sits there, her mouth shut. But he notices.

“How do you do that?” he asks her instead, when her thumbs smear water on his face. “What did you feel when you beat up that guy?”

“Angry. Betrayed.” His hair falls over his face. She fixes it. He probably needs a haircut too. “Scared like hell. Why do you ask-”

 

“I jumped in front of a train.”

 

She expects him to move away, but he doesn’t.

“There was this girl that I wanted to marry. She was amazing.” His cheeks twitch with a small smile, but that’s as far as it goes, disappearing as fast as it appeared. “I honestly thought she was the One.”

It’s a feeling Marianne knows all too well. His jaw is prickly with a beginning of a scruffy beard, and it tickles her palms, coarse little hairs scratching at her fingers.

“She was not. But I found out a bit too late. She said I was… never home. Said… she was going to have a baby with somebody else and-” Bog gulps, and it rolls down his throat, like he swallowed some words, because his next sentence has less structure, but more emotion. “Drunk and stupid and angry and I…”

 

Marianne wants to say it’s okay. That it’s alright. But it isn’t.

“Love is full of bullshit.”

 

He blinks. He blinks and the ducks on the water quack, and an ambulance wails in the distance. “What?”

“You heard me. Love is full of bullshit. Look what it made of us.”

His head shakes. “That doesn’t solve the problem.”

“There’s no problem to solve. Just… fuck love. It sucks. Let’s never fall in love again.”

 

His face doesn’t change for a minute. She thinks that maybe she said it wrong.

But then a grin reappears, rising right to the apex of his eyebrows.

“Yeah. Let’s do that.”

 

“Promise?” she pulls her hands away, but sticks one between them.

And once again he shakes it.

“Promise.”

 

 

[“I _knew_ it!”

It’s another conversation altogether, something semi-related to the Yankees game her sister’s boyfriend - and a long-term friend, and a confidant, a co-conspirator, and maybe Dawn, flirty, flighty, light as feather, understands relationships better than Marianne ever did, go figures - is watching, because he jumps off the sofa in the apartment she is barely familiar with and plops his laptop on the coffee table.

“This is where I know Marianne’s guy from!”

“He is not my guy,” he kicks her leg at him.

“ _Sure_. My mother used to be this huge fan of ice skating, watched all the competitions back in the day.”

Sunny types something and Dawn scoots closer.

“His real name is Irwin King,” a click and the laptop starts to emit sound, an ambient noise of crowd cheering, while the announcers says something about representing the Marshland Skating Club- “I thought the ice skaters are supposed to be short.”

Dawn pauses the video. “Yeah, supposed to be. Cute butt though.”

“Dawn!”

“Just an observation.”

“I talk to him, Dawn. On a regular basis. I don’t need a mental picture of how hypothetically cute his backside is.”

The music starts, something classical, accompanied by the sound of blades on ice, in harsh strokes, and for some reason Marianne holds her breath. There is a rush, and a wave of applause, the woman talking about a triple axel, then triple lux, triple toe, Marianne has no idea what all those words mean.

“He’s _good_. Was good, I mean. I think they wanted to send him to Olympics,” Sunny adds.

“I wonder what happened,” her sister puts her hand on Marianne’s knee.

And Marianne knows. She bites the inside of her cheek and tastes copper.

“ _Nothing good_.”]

 

 


	6. Not to let disaster happen

 

 

Bog goes to the therapy because he is suicidal. His therapist thinks he is suicidal, or though so two years ago, but Bog is too angry at the world to be suicidal, Marianne knows, because she herself is angry, but she vents and Bog doesn’t. She vents and punches things, and kicks things, and twists arms, because her trainer, the one she asked Dad to find her, shows her how.

Marianne’s dad doesn’t even ask twice, doesn’t ask her if she is sure that’s what she wants, what she needs. He… never really did, did he? Not since Mom.

 

 

Perhaps she _was_ spoiled.

He doesn’t mention Roland even once.

 

 

Her trainer is a short lady with puffy hair and irking voice, but the lady teaches her to be more Marianne than she ever was.

“Look,” she says to Bog, when he jokes about her not needing to be any deadlier. He calls her a Tough Girl. She calls him a Smart-ass.

“Look,” Marianne says and twists his arm when he jokingly punches her shoulder. Jokingly, because if they are not joking, they are bitter, and if they not bitter, they are wrecked, and they don’t need any of that.

Because wrecked means vulnerable, and vulnerable means stupid, and stupid means open for a disaster to happen, and that’s what they have each other for.

To not let disaster happen.

 

 

So they joke about therapy, they make puns and laugh at them, and discuss people on the street, and scare pigeons from the sidewalk, their wings flapping furiously as they rush into the sky when Bog’s wheelchair rolls into their crowd, and then they laugh some more, first timid, and then roaring and unabashed, and absolutely _free_.

They go on “adventures”, like the one they had, except maybe with less angst and crying, and Marianne wills herself to not be bothered by the way he says her name when his hand touches her wrist when he wants to attract her attention to something.

It would be catastrophic if she does.

She promised.

 

 

Yet, Thursday gets friends in Tuesdays and Sundays, and then, when he says: “I can’t believe it’s almost the 1st of June” - because he is a person who hates mornings, and goes to bed at an ungodly hour, because 1AM TV is the best TV - Marianne is… absolutely fine with it.

 

****  
  


“What’s the color of your eyes?”

She asks him, when she sits on the bench in a park before the medical center and her hands clasp the armrests of his chair, his fingers ghosting over hers. She doesn’t know why she does so. Probably to fill his presence, recently it became insufficient to just hear his voice, recently, she finds, it’s not enough.

He doesn’t answer, a minute or two, but they last forever, so when he replies, his voice, a strange tone to it, makes her jolt.

“Blue.”

“Like what?”

A small huff escapes him. “You want me to describe to you the color of my eyes?”

His fingers brush against her knuckles. They tickle, and maybe that is why she smiles.

“Yeah.”

He sighs.

“You know I’m not good at describing things.”

She might be blind, but her face works just fine, despite everything that’s healed nicely on it, or so she is told. So she arches an eyebrow at him, a corner of her mouth rising.

“Try.”

His fingers trickle up the inside of her arm, sending a pleasant shiver straight to the base of her neck, from where it slips down her spine.

 

And then, something changes.

It’s hard to explain at a first glance. At a second, though-

At a second glance, Marianne discovers, lips pursing together so tight they get a chance to form a cosmic singularity, eyebrows bunching up, she

 

is _aroused_.

 

When he starts talking, she almost misses it.

“Imagine a summer’s day,” he says, and she is too late to catch a giggle that makes her mouth curl, as she tries to offset the panic of her sex completely betraying her.

«I’m _trying_ ,» he mutters, his hands pulling away slightly but then coming back.

“I’m sorry, were going to read me a sonnet just now?”

“Well… no,” but she bites her lip and thinks that she wouldn’t mind a sonnet, or any other poem, if he said it in that deep voice of his. “Not anymore at least.”

He scratches his chin, likes someone washing a toothbrush.

“Ah,” an exclamation, with what would surely be a witty answer. “Aquamarine.”

“That’s a strange color,” she says, to the _throb_ of her core that shouldn’t bloody _be_ there, and remembers the yellow umbrella, and grey pebbles under her pink baby feet, her father’s hair, already coming white at the temples, and the sea. If her voice isn’t trembling, it’s only by sheer willpower and dark magic. “Like greenish-cyan-blue?”

“No, no. Like a stone.”

“Ah,” Marianne replies, but _it’s not good, not good at all_. “Okay.”

“But yours are amber. Only without dead mosquitos and such.”

She punches him in the shoulder because he is being a smart-ass.

 

 

[Marianne blames medication. She chastises herself in mumbling as she takes an evening shower.

Her shower gel smells of the sea. She finds it to be most unfortunate.]

 

 

Marianne kisses the man with a Scottish accent two weeks into later, because she never learned to keep promises she made to herself.

 

 

They argue about politics or weather or something completely different and unimportant for the woman with no eyes and a man with no legs, and as the summer rolls in upon them, and neither of them have anything better to do with their time than to argue over hot beverages – and it takes them a little bit less than forever, because he is a moron who gives his phone number to a blind girl on a cardboard sleeve of a cup and of course, she throws them away, who keeps those things (all except one, with her name carved on it in), well he does, wait, really? – in their usual friendly manner, mostly expressed through shouting.

And he tells her that people are staring at them, and she drinks from her 10 o’clock mug, and he asks if she minds, and she doesn’t, let them stare. Even better, stare back at them.

“We are kind-a sort-a assholes,” he laughs. “Wanna act out a messy break-up?”

“Sure,” she grins. She grabs his shirt – it’s grey plaid with small stud buttons, he said, because she likes to imagine clothes on his corporeal form, he is not just a talking head with a pair of floaty hands – and pulls him forward, because he is at her 12:00 and he smells of coffee, and then he tastes like coffee because an ending needs a beginning and you can’t have a finish without a start.

 

Marianne kisses the Scotsman.

 

\- and rains upon herself the retributions the likes of which would have brought Bosch nightmares, and fuck _fuck fuck, what am I doing_ -

 

The Scotsman kisses her back.

 

Hand in her hair, hand on her wrist, their mouths pressed together in a compilation of lips and teeth and tongues, and fuck _fuck fuck, this is great but what is he doing_ , she is going to punch him so hard, but only when he is done.

But when they are done, she doesn’t.

“Not really a messy break-up,” he mutters into her ear, and his breath is hot and moist.

“A messy hook-up then,” she agrees with her face on fire.

“Uncomfortable PDA. I can roll with that.”

She doesn’t believe him. He is heaving. His heart is a raging war drum.

 

 

They are not in love.

[Her ovaries, though, don’t seem to give a damn.]

 

 

On the next session he brings her tea, and she brings him coffee, because they forgot whose turn it is, and it’s a strangest exchange they had so far. Because somehow she knows that this is not casual, not normal, or worse, actual _normal_ , what ordinary people do. Happy people. People in love.

But they are not in love.

Welch’s concerned gazes crawl over her skin like ants, itching like mosquito bites, and she keeps twisting her bracelet during the whole meeting, and when she finally drinks her tea, it’s cold, and the last drops of it are syrupy because he forgot to mix it and she didn’t notice.

 

What she notices is that she might have accidentally ruined this forever - she promised him, _she promised him, he trusted her on this one_ \- and if she doesn’t fix this, she might start hating herself more that she already does.

 

“Wanna know how many marshmallows I can stick in my mouth at once?” she blurs out when everyone leaves except for him, and the pregnant silence hangs between them - he probably expects her to leave as well, this _normal_ is not what they do, it’s not _theirs_ , simply can’t be, they are not _normal_ \- “No weird business.” She corrects herself. “No weirder than the usual.”

The sip of his coffee is broken by choking and coughing, and her hand flies to knock on his back. “Do I have to pay to see that? Because I feel like I should definitely be paying.”

 

How can someone be skinny and wide at the same time?

 

“Smooth, Mr King. Real _smooth_.” Her hand stays. “My last record was twelve. Are you in?”

Muscles flex under her palm, shoulder blades lowering, back straightening. His neck cracks. _Fuck_.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

 

This time, when she throws away the cup she pockets the sleeve.

 

 


	7. And I cry if I want to

 

 

On a day Marianne turns twenty four, not 24, but Twenty Four, it rains. She makes her way into the kitchen and Dawn jumps at her, and it smells like wax and chocolate.

Marianne eats homemade cake for breakfast, and it’s good, and it’s potent enough to make her forget about the pills in her stomach, and that she has to meet her father for lunch.

 

 

And for some reason, when she has to go to that lunch, 42, and 71, and 6 bus stops, she doesn’t take her umbrella with her, and her hair and clothes – a silly dress Dawn makes her wear, it’s so very hard to explain that there is no difference to her, but no, it’s her birthday, and she is going to a fancy restaurant, so there - are soaking, and her fingertips are pruny, so everything is a bit muddier than usual when she “looks” at it.

 

 

If her father is shocked, he doesn’t show it, his embrace furnace hot through layers of wet cloth, and his belly is rotund, his moustache is long and curly like it always was, but Marianne knows, that they are white now, like ash.

She places her glasses on the table at 15:00, and her cellphone three fingers away from them, and her cane is hanging on the back of her chair. The waiter takes great, the _greatest_ care to explain to her where everything is on her plate, but she misses most of it, because she is thinking about what her father says, and he says this:

“Your sister told me you’ve met someone.”

 

He is happy about it.

No, Marianne wants to say, I didn’t. Yeah, she wants to say, and he is better than anyone I’ve ever met. But she sticks her fork into a piece of something that’s on her plate, and that sound she makes is not unlike the sound everyone else in the restaurant, but the trick is, she isn’t like everyone else, so she says:

 

“He has no legs.”

And her father chokes on his spaghetti, because he always orders spaghetti.

“His chair makes the weirdest clicking sound,” she continues. “I’m pretty sure it needs to be looked at, or maybe have some maintenance. Is there such a thing as wheelchair maintenance?”

Her father clears his throat.

“But do you like him?”

 

She wants to explain that it’s not about liking, it’s about hot tea with her name on it, or the way he talks about paintings he knows nothing about and she knows everything, but he tells her about things she won’t be able to hear on TV and how he doesn’t have to say a thing and just feed ducks with her. It’s not that she likes him, or likes _likes_ him, which is worse, or that thing that his voice does to her limbs, which is plain scary.

Just sometimes, when Welch can’t just get over some boring speech of his, about loving oneself and accepting oneself no matter what, she taps her cane against the floor, and he rocks back and forth on his chair, they make music.

 

“He’s a good guy,” she says.

“Can I meet him?”

“No,” she shakes her head.

 

Not because Marianne is afraid that they won’t like him, because they probably won’t, and not because she is afraid that he might not like them, cause he would, everyone in this family is likable (on a first glance), but because a part of her doesn’t want to share him with anyone, because part of him is hers, part of him is her, and that part ain’t pretty.

And not that she cares that they’ll see ugliness in her, but they may recognize her ugliness in him.

And will judge him for it.

 

Marianne shakes her head and goes on eating what are probably mashed potatoes. She has no clue and she doesn’t care. Or shouldn’t care, but they stick in a blob of mush halfway down her throat, when her father’s hand covers hers.

“You remind me of your mother,” he says, and Marianne gets an uncanny feeling like she is in some family drama, and this is a heartfelt moment when the father-daughter bonds are mended, except she feels that comparing her to her dead mother won’t help – whoever thought that bringing up a dead parent for comfort is a good idea was simply masochistic.

“We both know that Dawn is more like Mom than I ever was.”

“Perhaps how _you_ remember her, yes.” Dagda smirks. “I, on the other hand, am reminded of a woman who gave me a tongue lashing for stepping on her scarf, that was inexplicably long to begin with. But so was the fashion back in the day, I recon.”

“Dad-“

“Marianne, I never wanted anything for you but to be happy.” Figures. Here comes the heavy artillery. “You know I always supported you in your decisions, your mother would have my head if I didn’t.”

His phone rings. He disregards it. That’s a first.

“But you seemed so in love with Roland, and I thought that he would change when you two got married-“

“He would… _change_?” And just like that, it clicks. The silence. The guilt. “You… **knew**?”

“I’m old, Marianne, but I’m not, forgive me for saying that, blind.”

 

Marianne is up before she knows it, and the only reason she does know is the sound of her stick falling on the ground, with her chair and someone’s fork. “ **Why?! Why didn’t you tell me?!** What sort of _reason_ would you have for not telling your daughter about the man she-“

“ _Please_ , sit down, you are making a scene-“

“Funny thing, Dad, that’s exactly what _he_ said before-“

He tries to calm her down, other patrons muttering around them, but she shrugs him off. Let them stare. 

 

LET THEM.

 

“You always knew better than anyone else, Marianne,” the tone of his voice makes her shiver, her ill-contained betrayal still running wild but slowly subdued by his clear regret, dipped in the matted pained melancholy. “Just like your mother. I didn’t want-“

“You didn’t want to _what_ , Dad?”

“I didn’t want to intervene.”

Her food has probably gone cold.

“ **You should have**. You are my _dad_ , Dad.”

She finds her glasses, trembling fingers fumbling and almost dropping them, but strangely succeeding at shoving them on her face.

“It’s difficult to raise daughters. You’ll know one day.”

Her phone is next, and her foot nudges around, trying to find her stick. “Good thing I have all these life-ruining mistakes to tell them about.”

His chair moves, as she tries to find pockets, and remembers that she has none.

“I don’t want you to make the same ones.”

His embrace is so sudden it disorientates her. The funny thing is, Dad was always big. He was tall and strong and could carry her on his shoulders to her mother’s worried glances, and could throw her in the air – she was his _princess_ , the long awaited child that they didn’t even hope to have, but against all odds, _did_.

Marianne guesses it’s her fault, really. It never occurred to her that he couldn’t be… Dad, big and strong and _reliable_ , or would ever stop being.

“I just…” and she let go. Wouldn’t hurt her now, for just a little while. “It’s a little bit too late now.” His arms tightened, thick trunks around her shoulders, so Marianne wraps hers around his shoulders in return. “But I’ll try.”

She skimms out of his embrace, her last word remaining in his grip like a shedden snakeskin, and she makes her escape, her things in heap, shoulder bumping against the restaurant’s door on her way out.

 

 

Marianne cries - bad word, she doesn’t cry, but wipes her face, damp as their outside - only on the porch, when her hair immediately gets wet and clings it’s soaked strands to her forehead.

 

 

Marianne is Twenty Four, and she stands on the bus stop to hide from the rain when her phone rings. It’s a generic ringtone, so she picks it up without hiding any of her mood that drums like an angry hollow staccato of drops on the plastic roof over her head and growls: “Yes?”

“Oh, great,” he says. “Wrong time?”

“Never been righter,” the bus approaches the stop, and opens door. “What’s up?”

“Wanna go to a movie?”

People step out, their umbrellas unfolding with clicks and wooshes.

“You’re funny.”

“I’m serious.”

There are noises in his background, people talking, the older woman’s voice telling someone to “shut the heck up or God forbid”, a kettle landing on the stove.

“It’s pouring cats and dogs,” and suddenly she is craving tea, bitter like a dark joke and strong like an accent he sometimes can’t get a hold on. “I don’t think your hot rod can live through it.”

“It’s sturdier than it looks,” but he backs off, and she cringes to herself, as the bus leaves.

“I would love to. Give me all the car chases and explosions and scenery,” she finds the place for the dullness that lines a layer under her damp skin, and hopes he will find encouragement within her sarcasm, since it’s the best she can do at the moment. “The good stuff.”

“I feel you are skeptical,” but his wheels roll with a rata-tat-tat and the game is afoot. “Let me change your mind.”

Oh God. She wants him to. Badly.

“Just stay where you are,” his voice is strained, and far off, and his clothing rustles like he is holding the phone to his face with his shoulder, trying to dress simultaneously, and it’s fidgety, and Marianne is just a bit pissed off that she finds it endearing. “Where are you, by the way?”

“At a bus stop,” she attempts to give him directions the best way her memory allows – the business center behind her back, glass and metal, the italian restaurant across the road where her father still sits, probably watching her out of the window, the smell of the hotdogs from the stand down the road.

“I… think I know the place. I’ll be there. Don’t move.” He replies and hangs.

So she sits and counts the busses passing, stopping and leaving, and her phone is gripped in her hand that rests on her knee.

She is Twenty Four, and her world is a dark hole, a burlap sack pulled over her head that is sewn right into her skin, and if she still needs someone, then to hell with it.

 

 

And if that someone is made of a sound of clicking wheels, and smells of soap, ylang-ylang and coffee, and that’s the reason she sneezes when he calls her name in a casual absolutely enthralled way he does lately – certainly not because she’s been sitting on a bench for half an hour, damp from the rain, and cold from the wind, and generally frustrated – it’s still fine.

No, better.

It’s okay.

“Is that your blind girlfriend?” someone says, when she opens her mouth, but promptly shuts it to bite her lips.

“That’s _Marianne_ ,” Bog responds, vigorously, in a snarl to end all other. “And that is Thang, as mindful as bloody ever.”

There is a dull slap. “Yes, good job, idiot.”

“And Stuff.”

“Bog, Stuff… and Thang.” Marianne chews her lips some more, but can’t help grinning. “Are you in a gang and haven’t told me?”

“No, they are people humans define as friends, and I define as too fucking nosy.” He takes her hand. “But they are my ride for the evening, so we’ll have to deal with them.”

She grabs the handles of his chair most casually now, which provokes a “Well then, they don’t look like they need help” whisper from one of his companions, the male one. Marianne just bows her head and pushes. The other grunts – she has a very low voice for some reason: “Except the car is in the opposite direction.”

“Whoops,” their hurried one-eighty is of a rough kind, chair swinging in her grip lightly – looks like she started to grow some muscle on her bones, finally – but they follow the chattering of his companions, or one of them, as he rattles on and on about Marianne being a good influence, and someone named Griselda loving her, and Bog snapping back with embarrassed irritation.

This is better. This is better. _This is better_.

 

 

They get into the car – _the back seat_ , with hard padding and a strange mix of gasoline and pine, Bog’s heavy grunt as he flops by her side – and drive. Radio blasts a joyful tune from the top of the charts, and the woman at the wheel shouts at what seems to be every single fellow driver. Apparently, this street is _hers_ , who knew.

Marianne falls against Bog’s shoulder on a turn.

“Your friends are…  fun,” she whispers to him, not moving away even as the maneuver is finished. He nudges her with his elbow, furnace hot, and touches the back of her hand with his in an inquiry. She permits, as the car shakes, and flips it over, so the heel of his palm presses into hers, and her clawing fingers dig nails into his knuckles.

“Weird would describe it better,” yet she hears no malice in him. “But they’ll rub off on you.”

And she expects him to let go, but he doesn’t. Instead -

“You look nice,” Bog compliments her like it’s not a compliment, but an undisputed fact and she will never _never_ get used to it.

“Well screw you too, buddy!” blares their charioteer, horns shouting back at her, through the window that rolls up as swiftly as it was rolled down, frisky splashes of rain hitting her arm.

Marianne pretends that it didn’t happen.

“Dawn took my wardrobe hostage.”

“This might be the first time I’ve ever seen you wearing a dress. Not that I’m complaining.”

“Well, my sister never learned what “weather-appropriate” means. “Seasonal” on the other hand-“

“It suits you.”

Her dad said so too, Marianne repeats to herself, but there is a _difference_ , and her initial response is to flush with heat, but she looks to the chill still in her bones, and cracks a smile instead: “Oh, Thank God. I was too busy ninjaing out of frills and pastels to check if I looked good in the thing.”

To which he coughs: “You did a good job. No frills or pastels here.” And growls, because the moving force of their sudden stop lunges them forward, and his fingers crack in her grip. “Bloody hell, Stuff, can you _drive_?”

“I’m watching you!” That was probably addressed to someone else, who honked back violently in their passing, because Stuff’s real answer came in a tone that was way too cheerful for a woman who, Marianne could only guess, just flipped at least three other people. “We’re here, BK.”

 

 

[First time she rubs it out after the accident, it is months after she loses her sight and finds something else, something that makes her electric and spastic and embarrasses her beyond all reason, but even that is not enough to stop her, because within less that six month aquamarine becomes her favorite color.

A blue which is not blue, but a whole range of color that changes at each turn, at each swing of a tone, and when it’s angry it’s a depth of the ocean, but when it’s happy, it’s the sky at 11 in the morning on a clear day in May, and when it’s snarky, it’s an edge of a clean-cut stone in a necklace worth thousands of dollars, but she gets this one for free. It’s all in her head, Marianne knows, yet

yet

yet when her face presses into the pillow, and her body curls onto itself, teeth biting the cloth so they won’t betray her, hands that are hers – but in the dark you can’t know for sure, can you, in the dark all cats are black – touch her breasts, and lift her nightgown, curling over her hip, drawing her topography, to hills and plains and depth undiscovered, and teeth bite her earlobe, and sharp knees pull her legs apart, and she grabs the headboard because she has to, because the accent in her ear asks her:

“Where would you like me to take you?”

She has a few ideas, most of them very inappropriate.

Marianne always had such an imaginative mind.

But her stars are aquamarine, and bright, and she will not exchange them from anything, because they explode from out of her, with her, and they might be the closest that she might come to _seeing_ anything ever again. And for that she is grateful. So grateful, in fact, that she will never let him know – just mutter her gratitude to the ceiling of an empty room, sweat on her brow and the space between her legs having its own life, breathing, flexing, constricting, split second bolt up her spine and down to the soles of her feet, that she presses into the mattress, because it has to go somewhere, or she will catch fire and burn

and burn

and burn.

 

 

She is not in love.

 

 

..?]

 

 

 

Marianne should have questioned the speed with which Bog’s friends dumped them to disappear into non-existence, but with a bucket of popcorn in hand, she was having way too much fun.

“Now, it’s all jolly good, but might I remind you,” she points to herself, her nail knocking on the rim of her glasses. “Me blind,” then stabbing at the screen before her (probably/maybe/that how theatre used to work, right?), “Film, a medium that requires _seeing_ to enjoy.”

“Not exactly,” the sides of large headphones plop against the sides of her head, but not quite. His wrist brushes against her cheekbone. “Let me just ruin your hair there.”

“Ha, blind, deaf and with a bad hairdo. _Now_ I see the point to this.”

One of the sides lifts and he blows into her ear. “Wait.”

“For wha-“ It’s a nervous kind of laugh, betraying the uneasy premonition of having him disappointed in this experience, and Marianne knows she has nothing to prove to anyone, but the thing is, she doesn’t want him to feel disappointed in nothing ever again. But before that laugh has a chance to form itself, there are _words_.

There are words, and they assault her ears, and they tell her a story about… Well, she would have expected zombies, or car chases, explosions, or something of the sort, despite how cliché or ironic that would have been but no, instead, she has a story about two teenagers with cancer.

“What a downer,” she jokes but fails to sound amused. She read the book, Dawn thrusting it into her hands few years back, and she knows, this is not a happy story, this is- “Just like us.”

“Except we are neither teenagers,” his words are less syllables, and more sarcastic vibrations against her skin. “Nor have cancer.”

“Josey has cancer.”

“Who’s Josey?”

If Marianne knew where his hand was, she would have probably pinched him.

“Just the girl who was in our group since forever. Certainly longer than I was. Do you even _listen_ to other people?”

“Only if they are as salty as I am.”

“Then let me watch the stupid romantic comedy you brought me to,” and it is a romantic comedy about people dying. “At least tell me if they are adorable together.”

He doesn’t answer, or if he does, she can’t hear him over the dialogue. But he steals her popcorn and she slaps him on the arm for that. “Shoo.”

“So stingy.” His hand stays on top of her arm. The cancer kids fall in love, and have wacky adventures that could constitute as fun when one is in his or her teens (or, like Marianne, in her mid-twenties and hopelessly juvenile), but their world is so… vast, and somehow, this movie trip is better than the movie itself, it’s like she is listening to an audiobook, but with better soundtrack.

And she won’t get lost, though. She won’t.

 

The little hairs on her skin rise with baby goosebumps.

 

There’s only a hand on her wrist, his grip in a soft shackle, a solid anchor to reality, so she can float as far as she can, and forget about everything else but the silly teens and their drama what is less funny and more relevant by the minute, and she can laugh all she wants that no one is this obsessed about a book, and that these kids should get some new hobbies, but truth be told, she might be obsessing, right this moment, about something that she shouldn’t be, in no way possible.

It’s a scary thought, that she never denied what she should have, and by this simple act of non-denial, she was probably accepting it, but so did he – what does that make them? Liars? Is his non-denial the same as hers, even if they are broken birds of a feather, peas in a misshapen pod of past mistakes and bad judgments?  And if so, does that make them any better than these kids on a screen, who think that saying “okay” instead of “love you” makes it less cheesy -  because saying “shut up” certainly is, and she’s been doing that swimmingly.

 

 

 ~~Marianne is not in love.~~  

 

Marianne is a _liar_.

 

 

“Well, now that that’s over with, and I’m about 90% sure that you are a sentimental whimp, what would you like to do?”

It doesn’t help that she is about this close to being teary-eyed, and that stupid dying teenagers got her, damn them, or that there were moments, mushy ones, where her skin itched with this distracting sensation of someone staring at her intently, while all that she could do was stare at the darkness before her and imagine it being an atrium of a church, or somebody’s funeral, or the night sky.

“I’m out of plans for the day,” his chair creeks in inspired wheelies that might give her a heart attack one day. “But we are absolutely doing zombies next time.”

The doors of the cinema, cold metal frames and smooth ringing glass, swing, and the car horns blare in an uneven choir, filling spaces around them with reappearing life, wet plops of shoes in the puddles, and sharp knocks of raindrops against her skin.

“This bloody rain just won’t end today,” he notes, jacket zipping. As an afterthought, the zipper goes back down, and the same jacket is thrusted into her hands. “Can’t have you catching a cold. Don’t think anyone would let me live it down.”

It’s warm, still keeping his heat as it was slummed during the film across his knees, and when she pulls it on, his jacket feels like a fleece hug made of spice and coffee beans. Her fingers wrap around the handlebars and she bites her lip.

“Well, just because it’s my birthday, we can’t have everything go my way, can we?”

Apparently the back of his head is right at the level of her solar appex. Marianne finds out about that when his sudden jerk pushes her breath right back out of her.

“It’s your… you didn’t tell me it was your…” He twirls to face her, as she tries to catch her breath. Bog is lost between scrambling and shuffling and whatever sound he makes, but his hands are suddenly in the pockets of his jacket which is still on her, and it is almost as if he is touching her, long deft fingers skimming her waist and hips in search of something. If her voice betrays her, goosebumps in the nooks of her bare knees, hairs standing up on the back of her neck, it’s just the cold, she would say. Just cold and rain.

“It’s… it’s n-nothing, not a big deal-” And just like that, his hands pull away and Marianne takes greatest care to stop her body from following them.

“No excuses. Now, I’m going to call my mother, because she knows how to make a cake out of practically anything.”

“You really don’t have to-”

“Unleash my mother on you on your birthday?” He gets like this from time to time, no-nonsense and ‘organizational’, smug-smirked, tight-lipped, and so hautly, this is something she has seen before, except it was a shallow imitation, a mask of papier mache and lies and Roland’s theatre of smoke and mirrors, and nothing, _nothing_ like the real thing. Sometimes, Marianne forgets that Bog was born to be an achiever. An over-achiever, if she is to be precise. “Yes, that might not be the best of my ideas, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Just give me a-”

 

 

Time stops for a heartbeat and then winds forward with the speed that is beyond human and she can’t keep up.

 

His chair ticks - once, twice - and then it doesn’t.

Then, it crashes.

 

 

**“FUCK!”**

 

 

She forgets how to breath.

Marianne knows she is moving only when her hand grabs the wet railing with shaking fingers and she is scaling down the stairs - _five_ , says her mind, _five steps_ \- two at a time, feet catching an overturned wheel still spinning, and she lands her knees with a sharp sting on the ground by it its side.

 

“BOG, ARE YOU ALRIGHT-”

“I’m fine, karma’s a bitch” he grunts, and his hand finds her shoulder, grip firm and reassuring, “get off the ground, it’s wet-”

“Are you sure-”

“Seriously, this puddle is like ankle deep-”

“ **Fucking hell, Bog, you fell off the stairs!** ”

 

It’s been a while, she thinks, since she cared this much.

Her breath finds her in the worst way, chest throbbing in a dull ache, like her ribcage is not enough to hold her lungs, and she can’t quite stop shaking, restless hands jumping all over his lying form. They are both wet and dirty and in the rainwater, and her dress is probably ruined, and so is his jacket, but fuck it, since she doesn’t know, if the wet in his hair is rainwater or else.

What she knows, is that her teeth are rattling, and it’s not from the cold.

“Hey,” he mutters, his hand on her arm pulls away. “Not the first time.”

“Oh, now _that_ changes _everything_.” Her face feels hot and numb, and her fingers find the edge of her skirt - it’s chiffony and makes this horrible sound when rubbed between her fingers.  “Fuck, you fell off the stairs,” she sums up. “F… I’m- I’m sorry, I’m sorry, _I’msorry_ -”

Marianne understands that her glasses flew somewhere when a strand of her wet hair is pulled away and combed back, tentatively. Her teeth still rattle, so she bites on her lips, and for some reason, they are salty.

And just to add an insult to the injury - _that_ he is proficient in - Bog states (with some sort of calm trepidation, or gentle concern, this _stupid man_ , he is the one who fell down crashing):

“Not worth it.” Knuckles grace her cheek in a rough wiping stroke. “ _So not worth it._ ”

 

Marianne wants to sob. She doesn’t.

She plops her forehead against his shoulder.

Bog doesn’t say a word. He breathes.

 

 

Finally someone comes to help them up, and it’s a century too late in her opinion, her stubborn sneezes mixing with his grim clicking tongue, and no words are lost within them, just buried on the backyard of their run down hovels of minds so that they can settle on their front lawns without them being trampled - any more than they already are.

In fact, they say nothing at all. He doesn’t call his mother, but passes her her cane when she tries to push his chair (it’s a habit now) and jumps back as if burned. They find her glasses on the edge of the sidewalk, miraculously intact, and Marianne plops them onto her face, but not before he wipes them on with his t-shirt (it doesn’t help - she doesn’t give a shit).

And when she is stuffed into the car again - the weird questions of “did you guys fall down the stairs of something” and “guess who is going to tell Griselda about this (it’s not me)” - and she is kindly offered a ride home, while her hair drips on the seat, and water flops in her pretty new shoes. The window is cold - her buzzing head appreciates it.

 

Except-

 

A huge arm, long and wiry with muscle, wraps around her shoulders and pulls her back, to his side of the backseat, to his chest, rising and falling, to his lips against her ear in a hot bothered whisper, while a wide palm presses under her collarbone:

“If I ever do that again, punch me in the face.”

 

 

She doesn’t get a chance to ask what he means by “that” - they arrive and she is kicked out of the car to take a bath so she won’t get a cold - _he_ won’t live it down if she does. 

 

( _Your jacket? - Keep it._ )

 

Bog promises to call. He doesn’t.

Dawn pours into her what seems like a gallon of cocoa.

 

 

[In her dreams, Bog falls down the stairs with a crack, and king’s horses and king’s men crowd around him with glue and assembling manuals. She tries to explain that he is not an IKEA dresser, you can’t just fix somebody like that, to put bits and pieces together and hope they stick.

But if she could unhook one of her legs and give it to him, she would.

“Not my assembly part,” he replies with a grin of a Cheshire cat, toothy and wide, sharp like a knife. “I don’t think they produce those anymore.”

“We can look into the later models,” and they proceed to do just so, with her dream turning into a strange quest for spare parts, and there are androids, and teenagers, their silicone lungs filling with cigarette smoke, and she has night vision because Dad got her fancy new robot-eyes for her birthday.

She uses them to egg Roland’s house at 2 AM. After that she kisses Bog and he tastes like coffee and a bolt of lightning.

They don’t get him legs, but they get wings, and her’s are huge and purple and butterfly, and his are narrow and transparent and they get him four - something about equaling the number of limbs - and

_Who the hell needs walking when you can be flying?_

Not Marianne, that’s who.]

 

 


	8. Hindsight is a Marvelous Thing

 

 

“How is your head?” She asks, through fruity and sweet of a brew, a thread with a paper tag weaving in her fingers.

 

“I’ll walk it off,” he chuckles.

 

She laughs. He doesn’t.

 

“Let me have a look,” she stretches her arm, meeting the prickly edges of hair that could have been a thick mane if it wasn’t kept preemptively short - Bog claims his mother is vigorously insistent on his hairstyles, something about him being an eligible bachelor: a joke, maybe, and possibly a rather cruel one, Marianne would have though. Until recently. Until her hands started to itch to grab onto him, to grip on these short locks and remind herself what sound he made when her tongue touched the roof of his mouth.

 

He hisses. She gulps and caresses the bump where his cranium starts to grow into his neck.

 

“Just because my brain is not splattered on the sidewalk, doesn’t mean my head is hit-proof.”

 

“And here I thought you were some kind of a roly-poly.”

 

His head indeed rolls, and she thinks it’s into her touch, since the edge of his jaw, raw with ever present bristle, scratches her palm, and it’s so _languid_ , caught unawares between casual and intimate, that her thoughts stop in their tracks to _feel_ him, his narrow face and the faint scab of a scar on his lower lip.

 

And maybe, to keep her mind from growing wistful, she leans, ever so slightly, towards him. His breath tickles. She smiles, lips catching on the edge of her fangs, as her fingers trace the rim of his cavernous ear, with the softest of fluff of its edge, like dandelion past its bloom - such a contrast, to the scratch of his jaw, or to the almost wiry nature of his hair.

 

Bog’s eyes close, slowly, thick eyelashes like butterfly wings on her thumb, and open again. Her heart trembles against her breast.

 

“Marianne,” he sighs against her pulse.

 

She turns to him, glasses coming off - he deserves that much, he earned it, her sign of trust, her silent, if not foolish, belief. “Yes?”

 

“Do you want to-” but he aborts, sentence unfinished.

 

“What is it?”

 

The moment passes, his lips to her skin, and then it’s lost, he bites at the base of her thumb, teeth sinking into her to a light sting, no more.  

 

She jerks away, but not without pinching his cheek. “Sweet mercy, didn’t your mother teach you not to put things in your mouth? You don’t know where that was.”

 

“Then stop touching people’s faces. Your hand, you should know better. ”

 

She pulls on his ear, and he stabs her ribs with his crooked - but so _long_ \- finger, and Welch has to pull them apart, because they are simply distracting and if they can’t behave, then he will have to seat them apart - Marianne hisses at that, actually _hisses_ , and the topic is dropped like it’s of fire (Josh, a twenty-something with PTSD who sits on Bog’s side of their duo, moves away from them, the legs of his chair scraping the floor like his life depends on it - Marianne wonders _why_ only briefly, but then again, the kid has PTSD).

 

 

 

Sometimes, Marianne can swear, she wished she could catch his voice in a jar, and she wouldn’t worry about being cold ever again - he is made of cold salt water and crispy grass on a rocky hill and the autumn sun, paradoxically dying, yet the most shimmeringly warm of them all.

 

 

The last time Marianne “sees” Bog, she brings him coffee, and when he takes it, his thumb presses at the dip of her palm where the bottom stood, and she bites the inside of her cheek.  He stays like this, her hand in his, bigger, longer, like a cradle for thoughts and things lost & found, cherished and hidden, and all of them – at the bottom of the trench that is her heart line and he is Jacques-Yves Fucking Cousteau on his yellow submarine, diving to the wreck.

“What’s up?”

Her line of inquiry is less than a line and more of a hook, hoping to catch the edges of him and pull him out of a pit of thoughts he gets a tendency to descend into.

“Just thinking,” he lets go. In hindsight, she probably should have not opened her mouth and just let him hold her.

“But really?”

He just smirks, a funny little sound, her favorite little sound, and leans to her, the huff of his breath on the rim of her ear.

“Secret.”

And if her pulse could jump out of her wrist, it would have, and would have punched him, again, because she already does, not for being smug, but for keeping secrets Marianne feels entitled to.

She would be right, after all, since “secrets” is the reason the next Thursday she says “Hello there”, there is no one to reply to her, and the only beverage she gets is Welch’s joke of a brew, a true gustatory definition for what “ennui” feels like.

It’s not the exact word, oh no, it’s too soft, not prickly or bitter, and too bland and melancholic, but she drinks it’s physical manifestation and holds her hand in her pocket where her phone is, treacherously silent.

When the session ends she’s the first out of the door, with her stick slamming against the walls before her like the windshield wipers gone wild, practically running down the corridor and jumping stairs, before pulling out her phone and muttering, in a command and not at all shaken way: “Call Bog”.

Her phone replies: “Calling Bog”, diligently beeps into her ear and… nothing. It keeps on beeping until the call goes into voicemail, as Marianne goes into a state where she wants to throw the thing as far as she can, stopping only at a thought that this is the only way he can reach her if he decides to call her back.

 

**He doesn’t after six voicemails.**

 

Hindsight is a marvelous thing.

For example: in hindsight, Marianne should have gotten the phone numbers of Bog’s friends. It would have come useful in a scenario such as this, when someone decided to stop picking up the phone, turning Marianne into a nervous frenzied wreck whenever the message sound came, causing her to rush, tripping and scattering things, through her apartment just to find out that her trainer wanted to reschedule. Maybe they would know what happened to the Scottish chairman her life introduced her to and made essential for some yet undiscovered reason, so she could find out where he lived and probably come to his house to beat him up for ignoring her -  yes, that would mean beating up a cripple, but so is she, and there has to be an exception because of that.

Another example: in hindsight, Marianne should have accepted, no, _insisted_ , despite the stairs fiasco, to come to his house for that cake-pie thing he promised, so she would not only know where he lived (see explanation above), but also might have met his mother, who seemed like a nice if not rather eccentric lady with her mind set on Bog’s well-being, which made her and Marianne like-minded, and by extension, confidant-comrades.

But that’s hindsight, and hindsight is a marvelous thing, 20/20 in Marianne’s case, so all she can do is sit in her oversized chair in the living room and demand - she is on this stage now, arguing with her electronics again, with Dawn’s sighs that grow in volume and concern with each passing day - “Call Bog”. And if sometimes Siri confuses her words, lonely syllables scrambled with her drying mouth, or spirited breath, or both, well, sucks to be Siri. And the longer he doesn’t pick up, the angrier and more determined she gets, and the voicemail count - as well as general passive aggressiveness of said voicemails - grow exponentially.

Once, in a moment of clarity (and Dawn asking her if she wanted to go do something - anything really, just to stop assaulting the poor man’s voicemail, because even she, the girl who almost stalked Denis Matters in eighth grade, is now thinking that it’s just a bit _unconventional_ ) Marianne stops to wonder if she is too much, and there is no prize to being the most obnoxious in this undefined relationship, but there definitely should be one for being the most of a Suddenly Disappearing Asshole, and damn right she is going to bake him a fucking cake with those words on it in glace, just so they would imprint on his stupid face when she throws it at him. She won’t be able to see it, but she surely will not miss.

Okay, she might miss. But it’s the thought that counts.

 

 

Two weeks pass.

 

 

_The number you are calling is unavailable at the moment. Please call back later._

“Well fuck you too.”

Dawn takes her iphone away when they both lose count on the number of voicemails she left. The last one was a simple and collected “I’m not mad” followed by it hitting the apartment wall.

 

“Marianne, I can’t share Mr King’s personal information with you,” Welch with irritating patience dodges all of her attempts at canoodling Bog’s address out of him. “Though, I _was_ contacted by his mother, who notified me that Irvin will not be able to attend our sessions in the near future due to personal reasons, and that it should in no way worry us, since he is doing just fine. In fact, if it would bring you any peace, Irvin is doing better than ever.”

Marianne considers beating Welch with her stick - but it isn’t really his fault, she wouldn’t want him sharing _her_ information, if the situation called for it, plus he is elderly, and she sort of likes him, in a platonic completely patient-doctor way, or even better, she doesn’t _dislike_ him, she is just getting extremely desperate and worried - when his monologue, growing from exasperated to joyful to a muted sort-of ecstatic, hits her in the face, and she is left with her rage hanging on the edges of her lower teeth, and she has **WORDS** she wants to say, and she would, if her jaw didn’t spasm from sheer _cheek_ of that sentence.

_Better than ever._

“You. Don’t. Say.” She manages through teeth shut tight and eyebrows doing a slight twitch, as if they are gained a life of their own and this existential crisis made them uncertain about the purpose of their their existence.

Marianne doesn’t know if giving up is the thing that she ever did, and if she did, she can’t remember. But what she remembers is a paper on the visual transformation of human representation through the ages, starting with Byzantine and all the way to the early Gothic, and the way her voice cracked with murder as she was writing it, vigorously, three days before deadline, head shoulders-deep in books, high on caffeine and sugar, but she would rather die than disappoint (herself). She was too stubborn and tenacious for that.

(That was the time when she stopped drinking coffee.)

She, Marianne concludes, _is_ still too stubborn for that. And too tired of having to compromise. Too tired of shit-ton of other things.

“Well then, I would like to _congratulate_ him myself,” she pulls out a smile, and feels her eyes crinkle with a variety of theatrically relieved wrinkles.

“Then you’d better wait till he contacts you,” Welch pets her hand, and his touch has this grandfatherly air to it. “I’m sure he has a good reason for keeping away from you. He does care a lot about you after all.”

“If you say so, _doctor_ ,” she nods and parts their ways.

She has a wheelchair-riding Scotsman to find to punch him in the face more than once, and quite probably tell him to fuck off.

How hard can that be?

 

****  
  


Apparently, quite hard.

“Is Marianne… sulking?”

“I think she scared her new boyfriend away. Being all crazy stalker psycho and stuff.”

There is an explanation to why Dawn is camping at her place all summer - it has nothing to do with Marianne, for once, and more with Dawn not wanting to spend any more time with their father than she is obliged to - and Marianne should have expected Sunny to become an integral part of her being here, just not _that_ integral, as in sitting in her kitchen from the moment she crawled out of her bedroom, to the second she fell asleep. They are young and in love and she gets all that, but being blatantly used for emotional closure or whatever the fuck that was and then tossed aside kind-a sours even the best of moods.

“He is not my flipping boyfriend. And I’m not crazy,” her cup lands on the table with a bit too much clang. “I’m angry.”

“What my sister doesn’t realise is that when you are angry, it’s just for a little bit.” Channelling their mother, Dawn pours more tea. The oven purrs with the fan turning as another pie rises in its heat. “Like, you are angry for an hour or two, a day at max, scream at a pillow, punch a wall, the usual. But not a week, Marianne. _Not a week._ ”

“I can be angry for as long as I want to.”

“Oh, sure you can. You are so… _Dad_ sometimes.”

“Oh, that’s good angle!” A snap of a camera at her side, and something wiggles with crackling, foil ripping off. “As you might have guessed, Marianne,” did she mention that Sunny recently got into polaroid? It’s probably worth mentioning. “Your father is still quite partial on the whole “younger daughter wants to move in with her boyfriend of questionable nationality and/or race and/or financial prospects” subject.”

“Good old Dad doesn’t want to make any more parenting mistakes than he already did,” there are good things about her sister’s presence, of course. Her tea, for example, it’s just the right kind of fruity and sweet and fresh, limited collection or something, and nothing compared to the slightly diluted sugar that **someone** couldn’t figure how to mix - it’s not that difficult, really: you take a spoon, you put it in the cup, and you _fucking turn it clockwise a couple of times, easy-peasy_ \- “You can’t blame him for being just a bit paranoid.”

“Marianne, if you grind your teeth any harder, I’ll have to sweep the floors, _again_.” The oven beeps with startled urgency, the smell of apple heavy and sweet spreading through the small space that Dawn seems to occupy in full with her narrow delicate frame of twirling skirts and bare feet on tiled floors. The door opens, towel swiped of its hook, and a small hiss of pain - Dawn and her usual hastiness, can’t wait for the damn thing to cool down just a bit - as a ceramic form lands on the iron bars of the stove. “It’s bad enough that I’m still digging cup sleeves out of the occasional drawers-”

Sometimes, in her anger, Marianne forgets that she is still a liar.

“ _What_ did you do with my sleeves.”

“Nothing!” The towel flies her way and hits her on the face. “It’s just sort of… weird? I realize that the one with your name on it is kinda cute, but the other ones, well, they are just the Tea Quarter cardboards, nothing special.”

“Don’t touch my sleeves.” The crook of her finger catches the cup, raises it to her mouth, lower teeth clanking against porcelain and… _stop_. She almost forgets that she is mad. “What the hell is the Tea Quater?”

Sunny, still swishing the photo about, sets his camera on the table. “A pretty cool teashop on the south side. It has all these fancy teas, and herbs and stuff. Like pots and cups and those things you put the mix in and stick them on the side of the cup and they look like cats and tiny people, and there is this one that looks like this little gray manatee…”

“You mean… it’s a one of a kind place?” Something snaps, something creaks, and some strange cogs start to turn in Marianne’s head, cogs she didn’t even know she had.

Bless Dawn and Sunny’s uncurbed enthusiasm about tiny household objects.

“More like The Place. Got this one from them, actually.” Dawn shakes the tea tin. Like a prelude to a major musical piece, a ritualistic rainstick in a faraway land, it works.

Marianne feels her legs moving before her idea even finishes being born into existence. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To the tea shop, Dawn.”

Her foot hooks up her cane, screw the sweatpants and the stretched t-shirt, screw that she looks like she just crawled out of her bed, and the her make-up need major refreshing, and if Dawn, stunned all the way back in the kitchen, could say something, she would have probably ordered Marianne to change, but Marianne in already by the front door, pulling on her slippers.

“But we _have_ tea, Marianne.”

She trots half-way back, hands, rummaging through the drawers where Dawn hides her phone - amateur, thinks she can hide things from girl who stashed cigarettes better than anyone else in high school. “Jesus, Dawn, just do it. I’ll explain in the car. Sunny, get the keys.”

“But the pie!”

“Oh… My God. I’ll buy you pie. All the bloody pie! But we have to go.”

They both groan in an almost natural unison, unique to married couples and people who know each other too well for their own good, and Dawn slams the stove close.

“I liked you better when you were sulking.”

 

The tea shop is located about half hour away from them - then again, it is Sunday afternoon, and the traffic is barely there - but Marianne can swear it’s the longest car ride in her life, if not the most boring one. Her logic is simple, as she explains to her sister in the car that has Taylor Swift blaring on repeat (and not even the old stuff): if her way of thinking is correct and similar to Bog’s in any way (and it is, it so is, proven by stupid dark jokes whispered in her ear at park benches and crowded cafes), Bog has to live somewhere nearby. No tender sensibilities would force any of them to travel any further from their home-to-therapy route than they have to (granted, not out of laziness or spite or lack of said sensibilities) . That is why the hipster boys from the coffee shop 63 steps away open a door for her when she walks out every Thursday and give her a gluten-free muffin on the house if they share witty banter (she calls it her “blind muffin” and it tastes like the ashes of someone’s grandma, but Dawn is into it, strangely) - a constant customer is a good customer.

“That’s serial killer talk, Marianne,” Dawn shouts over Taylor Swift who insists on shaking it. “You have to admit that that’s just a little bit creepy. Right, Sunny?”

“I would say yes, but she will hit me, and I’m the one driving,” Marianne doesn’t hit him, but she does pinch him and the truck swerves slightly. “You’re on your own on this, baby.”

“See? Creepy.”

 

Alright, maybe a little bit, but Marianne needs answers, and if not answers, then some hints at least, and if not hints, then… then nothing. Marianne needs nothing, even if nothing doesn’t need her.

 

**  
  
**“Hi, yeah, I’m looking for a guy in a wheelchair,” she knees the downside of the counter, hisses in pain, but goes on, unyielding toothy grin on her face. “Has a Scottish accent, a very long nose and a very loud voice if he wants to. Responds to Bog.” **  
**

Her fingers grip the edge of the wood, hoping, desperately, that the answer she’ll get will not be on the lines of “sorry, never heard of him”. What she gets is Dawn clearing her throat behind her back. “What? What’s wrong? They don’t know him?”

“Oh, I think they know him.” Dawn eases her fingers down. “And they are not happy about it.”

“Oh, yeah, we know _that asshole_ ,” the girl behind the counter sounds like she is Dawn’s age, college student probably, and if her voice wasn’t full of disdain, it could have been quite melodic. “Haven’t seen him around in a while.” She turns to the right, clanking sounds accompanying her, and screams.

“IAN, have you seen the Rolling Menace recently?”

In the direction of her scream, a door opens, cheep hinges creaking.

“No, not really. THANK GOD.”

The barista turns her way back, porcelain cup on the counter. “You heard him. Why do you ask, got some beef with him?” She smirks. “Cause if you do, I think we got a drink with your name on it on the house.”

“Sort of…” Marianne clenches her teeth, and lets go. She wants to bite her cheek, punch somebody, break something, so what if she is mad at him, doesn’t mean that they have a right to… to…

“Sorry, sis,” Dawn boxes her shoulders in an awkward hug, and tries to pull her away, “this was a great idea, really.” Their arms loop. “C’mon, Marianne, let’s get some cookies, their chocolate chip is to die for, OH, they have The Cutest mugs here-”

“Wait!”

Someone grabs her hand, fingers long and lukewarm wrapping around, short manicured nails digging into the soft skin on the underside of her wrist, and pulls, gently, yet very insistently. “You are Marianne. Like _The Marianne_?”

Her name sounds so incredulous, like she is La Jaconda that suddenly walked into the tea shop with the dress and the hand and definitely the smile. Except Marianne is not La Jaconda, or famous in any way.

“I’m _just_ Marianne. Do I _know_ you?”

The girl lets go with a soft clap, makes a sound like a poorly hidden squeal, sort of hops on one place and “IAN, _Marianne_ is here!”, followed by a scrambling, door being swung open so wide it hits the wall, rattling cups and glass shelves, someone rushing to the counter in a swing of an apron, resin soles skidding on the tiled floor.

“What.” The kid, probably another college student, shuffles, leaning over the counter, a low hum in his throat somewhere in the vicinity of her face, and then hops back. “Let me guess,” he comes off snooty and maybe a bit disappointed, “she is the hipster one.”

“Ian, Jesus Christ, this is why you are on cleaning duty forever,” the baristra girl groans and rustles with some sort of a wrapper. “Now just go and finish the dishes.”

“No, wait, no, but it’s the Marianne!”

This is when Marianne knows that this is not the place she wants to be. Because Marianne is loud and stubborn, but she is not a fan of being a spectacle. And being The Marianne is a sure way of being defined as one.

“Thanks, but uh, we’ll be going - Dawn, get the cookies or whatever you wanted-”

“We hate you a little bit.” Ian notifies her in a hushed tone, as Marianne tries to keep her face neutral. “Your boyfriend is the most fucking annoying customer we have. But Mel now owes me a twenty, so thank you.”

“ _Excuse_ me? _I owe you_? My bet was that she would be prettier than any girlfriend _you_ ever had-”

“I am NOT his girlfriend.”

“It’s sort of weird between them,” Dawn, who already managed to dislocate herself from Marianne’s elbow, shares her insight that no one asked for. “Do you have that in pink?”

Ian leans over the counter, and on a second approach, he smells too much like mint and lavender, and just simply too much. “Just ran out, sorry. Still have green and blue available though. Now, on the topic of your NOT boyfriend, we haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks. Which is sort of sad, he is an okay kinda man if you can get past the face, the demeanor, the attitude…”

“I got it, _thanks_ ,” Marianne bites her lower lip, and fights the urge to punch this child in the face. That would make her feel better, but wouldn’t be a solution to her predicament. Leaving seems like a better option. “Well, you have a nice place here, but Dawn, can we leave now?”

The bell, signifying the opening door, calls to her like an otherworldly Siren of electronic variety.

“Oh, but his friends over there surely do,” Mel, the other of the barista duo, touches Marianne’s hand again - unlike her partner, she somehow manages to be decisive and low key simultaneously - and turns her towards the exit and to the recognisable voice of one Thang, and his “Oh, look, Stuff, it’s Marianne!” that nails the later straight to the ground where she stands, locked in a limbo of relief and disbelief and hope so painful it twists a corkscrew right into her breastbone.

 

“Hi,” she says, and feels her eye twitch in a way one could misread as a crooked smile, so she lets it be one. “I need to see Bog.”

His name catches in her throat. She pretends that it didn’t.

 

**  
**Marianne stands on the doorstep of a condo apartment, and keeps looking for the doorbell, as in caressing the doorframe in a disturbingly familiar manner. That’s the simplest of her problems now, really, since she gave up on calming her emotions long before Thang, skinny and short, but not Sunny-short, in a sturdy grounded kind of way, like Stuff, for example, just _short_ , escorts her down the corridor with justified trepidation. Stuff just sort of follows them, and yet at the same time doesn’t, at the same time she sort of pretends she doesn’t know them (yet gives Dawn and Sunny an abridged version of their ‘birthday date’ as Dawn does the awwing and the gasping and the “Marianne, why is this the first time I hear about this?”) **  
**

Marianne guesses her facial expression at the moment does not inspire any sort of ease and rightfully so.

“I give,” she makes another attempt, hands flat against the doorframe. “Where is the bloody doorbell.”

Thang on her right coughs. “The knocker is right in front of you.”

“The knocker,” she repeats, and fights a snarl that she has to save for later. “The knocker will do.”

Instead, she bangs her foot on the wood.

“Marianne!”

“Oh, he is not going to like that.”

“Oh, he can stuff it - no pun intended. He owes me.” **  
**

Behind the door footsteps shuffle, old flip flops slapping against bare feet, and the hinges moan to greet her.

Marianne pulls herself together. “Hi there, I’m looking for Bog?”

She expects the door to be slammed into her face. To to be asked to kindly fuck off. Or something on the similar lines. Marianne does not expect this.

“I never thought this day would come,” replies the woman, possibly of age, certainly with a estatic teary note to her voice, as she squeezes the life out of her in an embrace that puts all of Dawn’s, hell, anyone else’s to shame.

“That’s Marianne,” her “guide” pops from behind them, with less reverent fear and more joyous relief. More, but not a lot.

“ **That’s** Marianne,” the woman _sets her down_ \- now how did that happen - and starts touching her _everywhere_. “We’re having tea and you are joining us.”

“Actually-”

“Bog!” Yes, now it makes sense where he got his set of pipes from.  “Marianne is here and luckily she doesn’t look too angry with you!”

“No, no, don’t misunderstand, I’m extremely angry,” Marianne corrects, honestly, how did it come to this, her standing in the doorway of Bog’s apartment with Thang and Stuff and her sister and quite probably Bog’s mother, and somehow, she has to warn them that she is here to start a fight.

“Serves him right,” the lady huffs in return and suddenly shakes her hand - and her grip is firm, _motherly_ , confident and calloused, yet soft in all the right places, and for a single moment, Marianne doesn’t want to let go. “I’m Griselda, the idiot’s mother. Come in, he is in the living room.”

“Alright.” Marianne moves in, the unfamiliarity of the place throwing her off course just enough for her feet to shuffle the rug that bunches and glides, but determination rings clear, making her feverish. Her stick hits something, someone’s ankle, before-

“Shoes off!” The woman throws over her shoulder, nonchalant as Thang bumps against her back.

“Uh… sure.”

 

Now, scrambling for her slippers to get off, toes jerking away because the floor is cold (“Hi, I’m Dawn, the crazy girl’s sister, this is my boyfriend, we have cookies”), she continues on, small steps and wildly swinging cane, her skin tingles as the space expands around her, air changing to that same familiar pine and coffee, but with tea and spices, cumin and pepper and thyme, all mixed together with wet earth of all things. She stops still, officially lost all at once.

Her next step includes her knee bumping against the edge of the coffee table, something falling off with a thud and a small curse rushing out of her mouth to join it.

 

“Did I… break something?” she asks, steadying herself and rubbing the bruise.

“No, no, it’s fine,” replies a familiar voice, turning up her inner infernos all at once. “Just a book, nothing major-”

 

“Good,” Marianne nods. She tiptoes in his direction, side-stepping things that go clunk and bump, until her calf is pressed firmly to the edge on a low sofa and she stabs the handle into his face. “First off, you better have an explanation, the _Best Fucking Explanation_ to this bullshit, cause who the fuck _does_ that?!”

The pressure on her cane shifts its direction 20 degrees to the right. “I’m here.” He moves her with calm acceptance of her standing in his living room. Or maybe her punching him in the near future. Maybe both. And just for that she wants to hit him one more time.

 

She should start a counter or something.

 

“-thanks. So about that explanation?”

“It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“ _It was supposed to be a surprise_ ,” she parrots, as a small crowd moves behind her and into somewhere else (I love your house, are those handmade tea cosies? - Sure as death and taxes, luv), pausing briefly with “I told you this was a stupid idea. I told you she’d angry at you.”

“Mother, _**please**_ ,” Bog calls back, but it sounds more like a tired embarrassed whine.

“She’s right, you know. Maybe you should start listening to your mother. I’m quite… _livid_ at the moment.”  Her knee jerks, kicking the edge of the couch, sort of a punchline. “Who the hell does that? One day we are best buds, the other - you disappear for three weeks, no phone call, no text - do you know _how many_ voicemails I left you? My sister thinks I lost my mind.”

“It was supposed to be a surprise,” he repeats breathlessly, like it’s stuck inside of him. “And yes, I heard all the voicemails. All hundred fifty of them.”

“It didn’t struck you that I might have reacted a bit differently than expected?” **  
**

“It did, but only when you started throwing your phone across the room. So I figured it was just a tad too late for that.”

“Oh, guess what, now’s the bloody time!” Marianne realises that her hands are flying in the air when her cane escapes from them and lands somewhere. Somewhere far off. Somewhere where she would need help retrieving it from.

This was the worst thought out plan she ever had.

“Your cane-”

“Don’t mind it!”  Her now empty fingers get a chance to twitch and fidget with each other, find the bracelet, still secure around her wrist, even is she pretends that she’s just rubbing it in preparation. “Don’t. This is how this is going to go: you say whatever you need to say, I hit you in the face a few times, then I turn around and leave you alone with all your fancy surprises so that you can kindly fuck off and not cross paths with me ever again.” **  
**

“Marianne-”

“I’m glad we understand each other. You have a minute. Go.”

Her knuckles crack when she squeezes them. Under him, the couch creaks and something, like a stick, touches her foot, with a strangest sound, like her cane, but not really.

 

They pause. The world doesn’t. It boils with a kettle, buzzes with a fly against the window, rings in her sister’s laughter behind the door.

 

Marianne waits. Marianne waited this much. She can wait another minute or so.

Her nails dig in the palms of her hands.

****  
  


“Marianne… I fucked up,” Well, that was fast, like a breath held back, muffled with something, as if he was talking into hands or something. “Mother always tells me I get stuck on this one thing and I forget about everything else, and I guess she is right this time, because in hindsight this does sound like a really stupid idea-”

“Just out of curiosity, how long have you planned on staying away from me?”

“In my defence, I thought it would take less-”

“How long.”

 

He sighs.

“Uh… I was told it takes about half-a-year or so? But it depends-”

 

“Wha- As in… Six-Months Half-a-Year? Are you sure you don’t have a concussion? ARE. YOU. SURE.” And briefly Marianne reflects. And briefly, six month becomes a length of a  life-worth, six month can change someone completely. Six months can change everything. “Because you can’t drop out of somebody’s life for 6 month without a single reason and then pop right back and expect them to be fine with it?!…”

 

She doesn’t want to ask if he was even planning on doing that. It would probably break her heart, no matter the answer.

 

“Do I even want to know what that surprise was supposed to be? Cause I’m not sure anymore.” **  
**

“It’s… easier to show you.” Here’s that unnerving sound again, like he is trying to get something heavy off the couch.

“Wow, yes. If that was supposed to be a joke, you lost your tasteless humor privileges.”

“Just…” He grunts, heavy and strained. “Give me a sec.”

“No. _No_. You know what?” Her palms are sweating, as she rubs them on her t-shirt and her sides. “Time’s up.”

She swings like her trainer taught her, off the shoulder and forward, sharp, decisive, in control.

Instead of Bog’s face, though, her fist connects with something else, flat, human hard-soft, producing an UMPH somewhere at the ceiling of the apartment, or maybe beyond the roof, the sky and the far corners of the Universe: the same place that the next moment transmits Bog’s voice.

“Your… punches…” he groans, breathless, shuddering, and Marianne is not making it easier, since she is still touching the place where she hit. “Are getting… better.”

But her fingers skim, over a shirt with some logo, and find ribs, long and slightly protruding, and his heartbeat, and the volume of his lungs expanding in her grasp, and the way _his sides_ , his sides, ripple with faint memory of muscles and tone, as he… **stands** before her.

“Sur… prise?”

“Is that…” she prods at him, now up his chest, higher, and higher, and where this man even ends? “Why are you… No, _how_ are you…”

“Prosthetics,” he mutters and shuffles, and Marianne finds his shoulders, hunched, tense, and down his arms, there the supports dig into his strained muscle as he tries to hold himself up, wrists spasming as he grips the handles of the crunches in sharp-knuckled fists.

“Well, that’s…” There is a way to describe this, and it’s hidden in the folds of his clothes, since that’s where she looks for them, or maybe in the dip his hard-set clavicles create, but no, nothing to be found there, so she just spits it out: “Rude. Since when are you this tall?”

“I went after my da?”

“No, no, there is tall, and then there is whatever you are - _this is inappropriate_ ,” she switches to whisper, leaning closer, and expecting him to do the same - he better do the same. “I am a hobbit in comparison to you. You think you got whole two walking sticks and you can be the Gandalf of this relationship?” **  
**

Bog snorts, but it comes out as mix of amused and confused, with just an ounce of trepidation. “What was I before, may I ask?”

“I don’t know, Arwen on her fucking horse!” Her breath finds her, Marianne discovers, as her heart races forward before her, pumping blood to her brain so fast she feels light-headed, and she has to lean against something, anything - oh, but her stick is somewhere on the other side of the room - so she leans her forehead against the next best thing, which is a chest (his chest, _his_ ), and now the heartbeat doubles. “ _Liar_.”

“I’m not-”

“Liar,” she repeats. “ _Who needs walking_ , right?”

 

She feels him trying to balance his weight, from one arm to the other - she notices now, he is not really standing, that would involve putting weight on his legs, and he is more like hovering, growing weaker by the minute, and she is starting to feel ashamed, she is forcing him to exhaust himself, he did sound a bit tired to begin with - and then his breath skims the top of her head in the softest kind of way, because it a secret.

“Walking with you doesn’t sound too bad.”

 

There is a sound, Marianne realizes, that is coming out of her mouth, like a long continuous ‘MMMM’ that doesn’t know what it wants exactly to be, just the sound, voice of pure personal expression, broken like a white noise of an old radio receiver that her grandfather used to take with him while fishing, and now she is it, that radio, that can’t quite grasp what it is to receive. **  
**

Her face and fingertips are still pressed to Bog’s chest and that is how she knows that he first shudders, and then freezes, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“I’m… **So Sorry,** ” he mutters, stunned, like he just figured out the thing that he said and it immediately mortified him. “You can punch my stomach in for how cheesy that was.”

Marianne’s radio breaks. It breaks, bubbling her voice, twitching her lips, blinking her eyes, biting her tongue, and then spewing out a mix of thoughts, place and time appropriate, _appropriate_ , **appropriate** :

“Mmmmm-nah, that’s fine. But you are a moron if you think that doing this for **me** is a way to go, or, you know, for your **mom** , not that we don’t appreciate the effort, must be a real bitch - not your mom, I mean, to learn to walk, babies do it somehow, but babies are geniuses - just do it for yourself, baby steps, learn to walk, learn to fly again- Is my sister watching?”

He raises his head, and his chin graces her hair, as he slowly, but steadily sags.

“Blonde and judging and leaning out of my kitchen?”

“Yes, that’s her. I think.”

His ribs spread in a large inhale. “I think everyone is expecting of me to apologize.” **  
**

“Let them stare.” Her hands claw into his shirt and move up. “I broke our promise.”

He leans his head to the side, long thin neck stretching, embarrassment written in his voice. “What promise?”

“This promise,” she states, pulling him down by the collar of his shirt.

He has to readjust, she understands, wobbling slightly, falling forwards, but he sort of owes her, with that stupid stunt he pulled, so she has a full right to this one.

 

Marianne mashes their faces together.

 

**  
**What she wants to do is to kiss him. Really, not that difficult if you know where to aim. **  
**

Marianne doesn’t know where to aim. She can guess, since her lips are pressed to the stubble at the edge of his lower lip, right on that scar she found before. She licks at it. Bog chokes.

“Marianne-”

“Shut up,” her head turns a bit, and now, _it’s so much better_ , her hands traveling over his shoulders and against his neck, thumbs rubbing the sharp angle of his jaw, while she is probably leaving her lipstick all over his mouth - **it’s so much better.**

She finds out that she closed her eyes when they pop open from the sudden feeling of the opposing pressure that is strong enough for her neck to crack. It lessens - only a tiny bit - “ _A’ight?_ ” - less a question, more of an interjection smeared across her lips that she bites at, he really needs to learn when to stop talking,

 

And to highlight her point, she digs her nails into the nape of his neck, and uses his soft moaning pant as an excuse to shove her tongue into his mouth. That would show him, if she manages to pay attention to anything else but the scratch of scruffier-than-usual beard on her face, and how warm and shuddering deep is his breath where his nose pokes into her cheek, and how the world slowly comes to a still, skidding and slipping on the rogue beats of their hearts.

In their thick hormonal hue, Marianne floats, and the space between her thighs is thick and pulling, and her stupid glasses are in the way of having enough of him, so she lets go to just yank them of her head and onto the floor and back to the ridges of his spine, ragged like a mountain range she can’t wait to discover, but to get there, she must get through a myriad of other wonderful discoveries, like a narrowing of his torso to his waist and hips, almost malnourished, almost bony, but defined in a way that makes her want to press all of her to all of him, and to just stay like that, possibly forever.

 

Or until he urgently pulls away, swinging back, or trying to swing back with her arms wrapped around him, and a breathless “This is good, great, absolutely great, but I’m about to fall on top of you”. And then, with an murmuring awkwardness to his voice like it’s his face that is on bloody fire and not hers, he adds: “ _Jesus, woman_.”

 

Next thing she knows he starts to sink down and she is still wrapped around him and not sinking, so her arms flex, and she holds him up.

 

“Do you…” her words end up in his clavicles, and dangle there, between sandalwood and spice and moist earth. “…even eat these days?”

His chin rubs the top of her head, and Marianne thinks that now her legs might give up, when he borrows his nose into the mess she calls her hair - oh, and she is a mess altogether, not just her hair, but her misshapen clothes and a boiling cauldron of feelings towards this man it would take too made words to define, _or maybe just three_ \- and his lips press into the unruly locks.

“Might have forgotten once or twice.” He grumbles, and it’s sweetly disgruntled enough she could cry or laugh or both. She sniffles as a result, and his whole upper body tenses as a result. “C’mon, Tough Girl, I told you. Not worth it.”

“Or how about I decide about what’s ‘worth it’ and what isn’t while you shut up and think about your behavior. _Making me worried like that…_ ”

She pinches him, her fingers buried into his sides right beneath his ribs, and he trembles against her.

 

And then

 

Then they fall, down and forward, and she releases a squeak, but it disappears into his chest, and a pair of arms that wrap around her, like a shroud, like a cocoon, dragging her forward, a hand pulling her human knees over his polymer ones, with click and clang of falling crunches and _Marianne you are_ \- what Marianne is, she can’t even fathom, but it makes her toes curl.

 

Marianne knows they are both liars.

But they are really bad at it.

 

Marianne digs her fingers into his spine and listens to him groan against her forehead.

 

Marianne is in love.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story takes a break, since this is the last of my backlog on this particular story. More at a later date.


End file.
